Lady Arthur secluded herself for some weeks in her own room, seeing no one but the servants who attended her; and when she came forth it was found that her eccentricity had taken a curious turn:  she steadily ignored the death of her husband, acting always as if he had gone on a journey and might at any moment return, but never naming him unless it was absolutely necessary.  She found comfort in this simulated delusion no doubt, just as a child enjoys a fairy-tale, knowing perfectly well all the time that it is not true.  People in her own sphere said her mind was touched:  the common people about her affirmed without hesitation that she was “daft.”  She rode no more, but she kept all the horses and dogs as usual.  She cultivated a taste she had for antiquities; she wrote poetry—–­ ballad poetry—­which people who were considered judges thought well of; and flinging these and other things into the awful chasm that had been made in her life, she tried her best to fill it up.  She set herself to consider the poor man’s case, and made experiments and gave advice which confirmed her poorer brethren in their opinion that she was daft; but as her hand was always very wide open, and they pitied her sorrow, she was much loved, although they laughed at her zeal in preserving old ruins and her wrath if an old stone was moved, and told, and firmly believed, that she wrote and posted letters to Lord Arthur.  What was perhaps more to the purpose of filling the chasm than any of these things, Lady Arthur adopted a daughter, an orphan child of a cousin of her own, who came to her two years after her husband’s death, a little girl of nine.

II.

Alice Garscube’s education was not of the stereotyped kind.  When she came to Garscube Hall, Lady Arthur wrote to the head-master of a normal school asking if he knew of a healthy, sagacious, good-tempered, clever girl who had a thorough knowledge of the elementary branches of education and a natural taste for teaching.  Mr. Boyton, the head-master, replied that he knew of such a person whom he could entirely recommend, having all the qualities mentioned; but when he found that it was not a teacher for a village school that her ladyship wanted, but for her own relation, he wrote to say that he doubted the party he had in view would hardly be suitable:  her father, who had been dead for some years, was a workingman, and her mother, who had died quite recently, supported herself by keeping a little shop, and she herself was in appearance and manner scarcely enough of the lady for such a situation.  Now, Lady Arthur, though a firm believer in birth and race, and by habit and prejudice an aristocrat and a Tory, was, we know, eccentric by nature, and Nature will always assert itself.  She wrote to Mr. Boyton that if the girl he recommended was all he said, she was a lady inside, and they would leave the outside to shift for itself.  Her ladyship had considered the matter.  She could get decayed gentlewomen and clergymen and officers’ daughters by the dozen, but she did not want a girl with a sickly knowledge of everything, and very sickly ideas of her own merits and place and work in the world:  she wanted a girl of natural sagacity, who from her cradle had known that she came into the world to do something, and had learned how to do it.