Thus soliloquizing, he suffered the rein to fall on the neck of his
horse, which paced slowly home through the village, till it stopped--as
if in the mechanism of custom--at the door of a cottage a stone's throw
from the lodge. At this door, indeed, for several successive days, had
Maltravers stopped regularly; it was now tenanted by the poor woman his
introduction to whom has been before narrated. She had recovered from
the immediate effects of the injury she had sustained; but her
constitution, greatly broken by previous suffering and exhaustion, had
received a mortal shock. She was hurt inwardly; and the surgeon informed
Maltravers that she had not many months to live. He had placed her under
the roof of one of his favourite cottagers, where she received all the
assistance and alleviation that careful nursing and medical advice could
give her.

This poor woman, whose name was Sarah Elton, interested Maltravers much.
She had known better days: there was a certain propriety in her
expressions which denoted an education superior to her circumstances; and
what touched Maltravers most, she seemed far more to feel her husband's
death than her own sufferings,--which, somehow or other, is not common
with widows the other side of forty! We say that youth easily consoles
itself for the robberies of the grave,--middle age is a still better
self-comforter. When Mrs. Elton found herself installed in the cottage,
she looked round, and burst into tears.

"And William is not here!" she said. "Friends--friends! if we had had
but one such friend before he died!"

Maltravers was pleased that her first thought was rather that of sorrow
for the dead than of gratitude for the living. Yet Mrs. Elton was