But that day never came. Margaret, indeed, yielded at last, from sheer want of strength to resist any longer. She married Sir Edward, but she went to her wedding as an unwilling nun might take the vows in her convent. Even her mother had some misgivings as she noticed her daughter's white cheek and sunken eye, and saw the mechanical and lifeless manner in which she went through the marriage ceremony and received the congratulations of her friends, especially as she could not but perceive that the same things were noticed and remarked upon by the company. "But it will be all right when she has once a family about her," said she to her husband. "She will busy herself with the duties and the pleasures of her station, and forget all about that idle young Winthrop." Lord Carew had his doubts about things ever being again all right with Margaret, but he was a man who loved peace and quiet at home, so he only replied to his wife's predictions with a vague shake of the head, which might mean anything or nothing. Margaret was never to hold in her arms a child of her own. Her first and only infant came into the world only to receive a name and a place in the family vault of the Peckhams under Holford Church, while its mother was unconscious of its existence. For many days she lay between life and death, and for weeks and months she was confined to the darkened chamber, which it was feared she would never leave again. At last, however, she recovered and resumed the duties of her station, performing them all with anxious, punctilious accuracy, as if she would thus make up to her husband for that love which she was unable to give him. For years she lived under a heavy cloud of religious depression which nothing could remove. She felt that she had sinned against herself and her husband in taking upon herself vows which she could not perform, and she thought she had thus shut herself quite out of God's mercy. Thus she was deprived of the only thing which could have been any comfort to her. This persuasion had finally given way under the judicious counsel of some of those religious teachers who in the midst of a faithless and perverse generation inculcated a pure and exalted spirituality, such as has never been surpassed. She learned to seek in faithful and earnest self-consecration that peace which the world can neither give nor take away. And her long-troubled heart found rest in God. Thenceforward her life was one long waiting till that change should come which would restore her to all she loved best. And she was content to wait, doing all in her power to promote the welfare and happiness of those about her, to make up for or to conceal all that was wanting in her husband, and to perfect holiness in the fear of God.