A time had come when childish vanity and frivolity were verging on levity and imprudence.  Expostulations fell powerless on her shallowness.  Painful was the remembrance of the deprecating roguish glance of the beautiful eyes, and the coaxing caresses with which she kissed away the lecture, and made promises, only to forget them.  She was like the soulless Undine, with her reckless gaiety and sweetness, so loving and childish that there was no being displeased with her, so innocent and devoid of all art or guile in her wilfulness, that her faults could hardly bear a harsher name than follies.

Again, Mrs. Ponsonby thought of the days when she herself had been left to stay with her old uncle and aunt.  In this very house while her husband was absent abroad, when she had assisted them to receive the poor young wife, sent home in failing health.  She thought of the sad weeks, so melancholy in the impossibility of making an impression, or of leading poor Louisa from her frivolities, she recalled the sorrow of hearing her build on future schemes of pleasure, the dead blank when her prattle on them failed, the tedium of deeper subjects, and yet the bewitching sweetness overpowering all vexation at her exceeding silliness.  Though full one-and-twenty years had passed, still the tears thrilled warm into Mrs. Ponsonby’s eyes at the thought of Louisa’s fond clinging to her, in spite of many an admonition and even exertion of authority, for she alone dared to control the spoilt child’s self-will; and had far more power than the husband, who seemed to act as a check and restraint, and whose presence rendered her no longer easy and natural.  One confidence had explained the whole.

’You know, Mary dear, I always was so much afraid of him!  If I had had my own way, I know who it would have been; but there were mamma and Anna Maria always saying how fortunate I was, and that he would be Prime Minister, and all the rest.  Oh!  I was far too young and foolish for him.  He should have married a sober body, such as you, Mary!  Why did he not?  She wished she had never teased him by going out so much, and letting people talk nonsense; he had been very kind, and she was not half good enough for him.  That confession, made to him, would have been balm for ever; but she had not resolution for the effort, and the days slid away till the worst fears were fulfilled.  Nay, were they the worst fears?  Was there not an unavowed sense that it was safer that she should die, while innocent of all but wayward folly, than be left to perils which she was so little able to resist?

The iron expression of grief on her husband’s face had forbidden all sympathy, all attempt at consolation.  He had returned at once to his business in London, there to find that poor Louisa’s extravagance had equalled her folly, and that he, whose pride it had been to redeem his paternal property, was thrown back by heavy debts on his own account.  This had been known to Mrs. Ponsonby, but by no word from him; he had never permitted the most distant reference to his wife, and yet, with inconsistency betraying his passionate love, he had ordered one of the most beautiful and costly monuments that art could execute, for her grave at Ormersfield, and had sent brief but explicit orders that, contrary to all family precedent, his infant should bear no name but Louis.