She saw it at last, and moved slowly towards it,—­a plain white marble cross, rising from a smooth grassy eminence, where a rambling rose, carefully and even artistically trained, was just beginning to show pale creamy buds among its glossy dark green leaves.  Great tears rose to her eyes and fell unheeded, as she read the brief inscription—­’Sacred to the Memory of Robert Vancourt of Abbot’s Manor,’ this being followed by the usual dates of birth and death, and the one word ‘Resting.’  With tender touch Maryllia gathered one leaf from the climbing rose foliage, and kissing it amid her tears, turned away, unable to bear the thoughts and memories which began to crowd thickly upon her.  Almost she seemed to hear her father’s deep mellow voice which had been the music of her childhood, playfully saying as was so often his wont:—­“Well, my little girl!  How goes the world with you?” Alas, the world had gone very ill with her for a long, long time after his death!  Hers was too loving and passionately clinging a nature to find easy consolation for such a loss.  Her uncle Frederick, though indulgent to her and always kind, had never filled her father’s place,—­her uncle Frederick’s American wife, had, in spite of much conscientious tutelage and chaperonage, altogether failed to win her affection or sympathy.  The sorrowful sense that she was an orphan, all alone as it were with herself to face the mystery of life, never deserted her,—­and it was perhaps in the most brilliant centres of society that this consciousness of isolation chiefly weighed upon her.  She saw other girls around her with their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters,—­but she—­she, by the very act of being born had caused her mother’s death,—­and she well knew that her father’s heart, quietly as he had endured his grief to all outward appearances, had never healed of that agonising wound.

“I think I should never have come into the world at all,”—­she said to herself with a sigh, as she returned over the fields to the Manor—­“I am no use to anybody,—­I never have been of any use!  Aunt Emily says all I have to do to show my sense of proper feeling and gratitude to her for her care of me is to marry—­and marry well—­ marry Lord Roxmouth, in short—­he will be a duke when his father dies, and Aunt Emily would like to have the satisfaction of leaving her millions to enrich an English dukedom.  Nothing could commend itself more favourably to her ideas—­only it just happens my ideas won’t fit in the same groove.  Oh dear!  Why can’t I be ‘amenable’ and become a future duchess, and ‘build up’ the fortunes of a great family?  I don’t know I’m sure,—­except that I don’t feel like it!  Great families don’t appeal to me.  I shouldn’t care if there were none left.  They are never interesting at the best of times,—­perhaps out of several of them may come one clever man or woman,—­and all the rest will be utter noodles.  It isn’t worth while to marry Roxmouth on such dubious grounds of possibility!”