Sentimental young ladies, who croon over these pathetic words, thinking perhaps, with an approach to soft melancholy, of the desolation reserved for themselves in the future, when, their finest feelings unappreciated, they must shut themselves up in mystery, might learn a lesson from Mr. and Mrs. Augustus.
To be "strangers yet" on some points with that nearest and dearest, the unappreciative husband of the future, may possibly be conducive to harmony rather than desolation.
[CHAPTER IV.]
MORNING THOUGHTS—A RESOLVE TAKEN.
Soul of our souls and safeguard of the world,
Sustain—Thou only canst—the sick of heart!
Restore their languid spirits, and recall
Their lost affections unto Thee and Thine.
Margaret awoke early the next morning. It was a sad waking. For the first moment she could have wished to shut her eyes again, never to open them more in this world. Life looked so blank. And what wonder?
However brave the spirit, it must be affected by its surroundings, and to open one's eyes in a stifling room, with the consciousness that the raised blind will show nothing but a dingy yard, and beyond and on every side of it deserts of dingy yards, the yards shut in by black-looking houses, in all of which the like stifling rooms may reasonably be expected to be found, is, to say the least of it, disheartening.
Margaret's troubles in the little cottage by the seaside, of which she fondly thought as home, had not been less; but there was something in the wide breadths of sea, in its fresh curling waves and in the grand expanse of sky to soothe the dull aching of heart and brain, to give scope to the great doctrine of possibilities, and freedom to dreams that sometimes appeared wild and unreal.
Here it was different. In the narrowness of wall and enclosure life itself was narrowed down till it seemed nothing but a dreary blank of good; in the dull monotony of wood and brick what had been melancholy became bitterness, what had been prayers for help and guidance became one passionate outcry against Providence—one bitter complaint against what the tortured heart too often calls cruel fate.