'The recognition of the inevitable in human affairs often brings composure when all else fails, we read somewhere,' said the minister.
'Whatever is, is doubtless best, and this apparent stroke of evil fortune may—nay, must be so,' said Mary; 'yet it is hard to bear just now—hard to bear.'
Dr. Wodrow regarded her bowed head with a soft, kind, and admiring smile.
'All will come right in the end, dear Mary,' said he, confidently, and then added, almost laughingly, 'I am sure Captain Colville's advice may prevail with you; and he will be back before I can return from Edinburgh, whither I must go on the morrow morning early.
Mary's pallor increased at the mention of Captain Colville's name; but she said, firmly and doggedly,
'He is the last man in the world whose advice I would seek.'
But before the well-meaning old minister came back from his journey the crisis in the sisters' affairs seemed ended and over.
At last he was gone, and Mary sat for a time in the twilighted old dining-room as one who was stunned or in a dream, while the beloved and reverend figures of her dead parents seemed once again to occupy in fancy their favourite places by the hearth.
The good old honest furniture of the room was all of the 'old school,' and had been familiar to her from her childhood; the vast sofa with its wide arms and cosy cushions; the dark mahogany sideboard that was like a mural monument, with two urn-like knife-boxes thereon, and over which hung an old, old circular convex mirror, surmounted by an eagle with a glass ball in its beak. The horsehair chairs were ranged in rank and file along the wall; and all these household features spoke to Mary's heart so much of the past and of home that the details of the room gave her a sensation of acute agony, as she caught them at a glance and covered her face with her hands.
She tried to realise the new life—the homeless life—that must lie before her and Ellinor now, and the rocks, the shoals, and pitfalls that too probably would be ahead.