The baronet had behaved very generously to her in his last will and testament.  Certain sums went to kinsfolk, to charities, to servants; his land and the bulk of his personal estate became Lady Ogram’s own.  She was a most capable and energetic woman of affairs; by her counsel, Sir Quentin had increased his wealth, and doubtless it seemed to him that no one had so good a right as she to enjoy its possession.  The sacrifice he had made for her, though he knew it a blight upon his life, did but increase the power exercised over him by his arbitrary spouse; he never ceased to feel a certain pride in her, pride in the beauty of her face and form, pride in the mental and moral vigour which made her so striking an exception to the rule that low-born English girls cannot rise above their native condition.  Arabella’s family had given him no trouble; holding it a duty to abandon them, she never saw parents or brothers after her marriage, and never spoke of them.  Though violent of temper, she had never made her husband suffer from this characteristic; to be sure, Sir Quentin was from the first, submissive, and rarely gave her occasion for displeasure.  Over the baronet’s grave in the little churchyard of Shawe she raised a costly monument.  Its sole inscription was the name of the deceased, with the dates of his birth and death; Lady Ogram knew not, indeed, what else to add.

Fully another ten years elapsed before the widow’s health showed any sign of failing.  It was whilst passing a winter in Cornwall, that she suffered a slight paralytic attack, speedily, in appearance, overcome, but the beginning of steady decline.  Her intellectual activity had seemed to increase as time went on.  Outgrowing various phases of orthodox religious zeal, outgrowing an unreasoned conservatism in political and social views, she took up all manner of novel causes, and made Rivenoak a place of pilgrimage for the apostles of revolution.  Yet the few persons who enjoyed close acquaintance with her knew that, at heart, she still nourished the pride of her Tank, and that she had little if any genuine sympathy with democratic principles.  Only a moral restlessness, a perhaps half-conscious lack of adaptation to her circumstances, accounted for the antinomianism which took hold upon her.  Local politics found her commonly on the Conservative side, and, as certain indiscreet inquirers found to their cost, it was perilous to seek Lady Ogram’s reasons for this course.  But there came at length a schism between her and the Hollingford Tories:  it dated from the initial stage of her great quarrel with their representative Mr. Robb.