Then had come, first the idea of the marriage, and, immediately consequent upon the idea, the marriage itself.  The story of that has been told, but the reader has perhaps hardly been made to understand the utter bereavement which it brought on the mother.  It is natural that the adult bird should delight to leave the family nest, and that the mother bird should have its heart-strings torn by the separation.  It must be so, alas! even when the divulsions are made in the happiest manner.  But here the tearing away had nothing in it to reconcile the mother.  She was suddenly told that her daughter was to be no longer her own.  Her step-son had interfered and her husband had become powerful over her with a sudden obstinacy.  She had had no hand in the choice.  She would fain have postponed any choice, and would then fain have herself made the choice.  But a man was brought who was distasteful to her at all points, and she was told that that man was to have her daughter!  He was thoroughly distasteful He had been a spendthrift and a gambler;—­then a seeker after gold in wild, godless countries, and, to her thinking, not at all the better because he had been a successful seeker.  She believed the man to be an atheist.  She was told that his father was an infidel, and was ready to believe the worst of the son.  And yet in this terrible emergency she was powerless.  The girl was allowed to see the man, and declared almost at once that she would transfer herself from her mother’s keeping to the keeping of this wicked one!  She was transferred, and the mother had been left alone.

Then came the blow,—­very quickly, the blow which, as she now told herself morning, noon, and night, was no worse than she had expected.  Another woman claimed the man as her husband, and so claimed him that the world all around her had declared that the claim would be made good.  And the man himself had owned enough to make him unfit,—­as she thought,—­to have the custody of any honest woman.  Then she acknowledged to herself the full weight of the misfortune that had fallen upon them,—­the misfortune which never would have fallen upon them had they listened to her counsel,—­and she had immediately put her shoulders to the wheel with the object of rescuing her child from the perils, from the sin, from the degradation of her position.  And could she have rescued her, could she have induced her daughter to remain at Puritan Grange, there would even then have been consolation.  It was one of the tenets of her life,—­the strongest, perhaps, of all those doctrines on which she built her faith,—­that this world is a world of woe; that wailing and suffering, if not gnashing of teeth, is and should be the condition of mankind preparatory to eternal bliss.  For eternal bliss there could, she thought, be no other preparation She did not want to be happy here, or to have those happy around her whom she loved.  She had stumbled and gone astray,—­she told herself hourly now that she had stumbled and