"I don't know, dear. I have such a weary feeling; as if life at the very best were not worth the trouble it cost us. I shouldn't mind going on living if I could always lie here, and take no trouble about anything, and be nursed and waited upon, and have you or Conrad always by my side--but to get well again, and to have to get up, and go about among other people, and take up all the cares of life--no dear, I am much too weary for that. And then if I could get well to-morrow, old age and death would still be staring me in the face. I could not escape them. No, love, it is much better to die now, before I am very old, or quite hideous; even before my hair is gray." She took up one of the soft auburn tresses from her pillow, and looked at it, half sadly. "Your dear papa used to admire my hair, Violet," she said. "There are a few gray hairs, but you would hardly notice them; but my hair is much thinner than it used to be, and I don't think I could ever have made up my mind to wear false hair. It never quite matches one's own. I have seen Lady Ellangowan wearing three distinct heads of hair; and yet gentlemen admire her." Mrs. Winstanley was always at her best during those afternoon tea-drinkings. The strong tea revived her; Roderick's friendly face and voice cheered her. They took her back to the remote past, to the kind Squire's day of glory, which she remembered as the happiest time of her life; even now, when her second husband was doing all things possible to prove his sincerity and devotion. She had never been completely happy in this second marriage. There had always been a flavour of remorse mingled with her cup of joy; the vague consciousness that she had done a foolish thing, and that the world--her little world within a radius of twenty miles--was secretly laughing at her. "Do you remember the day we came home from our honeymoon, Conrad," she said to her husband, as he sat by her in the dusk one evening, sad and silent, "when there was no carriage to meet us, and we had to come home in a fly? It was an omen, was it not?" "An omen of what, dearest?" "That all things were not to go well with us in our married life; that we were not to be quite happy." "Have you not been happy, Pamela? I have tried honestly to do my duty to you." "I know you have, Conrad. You have been all goodness; I always have said so to Violet--and to everyone. But I have had my cares. I felt that I was too old for you. That has preyed upon my mind." "Was that reasonable, Pamela, when I have never felt it?" "Perhaps not at first; and even if you had felt the disparity in our ages you would have been too generous to let me perceive the change in your feelings. But I should have grown an old woman while you were still a young man. It would have been too dreadful. Indeed, dear, it is better as it is. Providence is very good to me." "Providence is not very good to me, in taking you from me," said the Captain, with a touch of bitterness.