“Well, Lily,” said Sir Robert, when the visitors were gone, “this will be something for you: you will have one ball at least.” He did not much relish the prospect for himself, but he was grateful, and felt that he must face it for her.

“I don’t feel so much enchanted as I ought,” said Lily. “Would it disappoint you much, uncle, if I wrote to say we could not go?”

“Disappoint me, my dear! But you must go, for you would like it, Lily. Every girl of your age likes a ball.”

“My age, Uncle Robert! Do you know I am five-and-twenty? I would rather sit alone all night and sew, though I am not very fond of sewing. Unless you want to dance and flirt and behave yourself as gentlemen of your age ought not to do, I think we’ll stay at home and play piquette. I am going to no ball,” cried Lily, her patience breaking down for the moment, “not now, nor ever. I—to a ball! after all these years!”

“Lily,” said Sir Robert, with a disturbed look, “I have expressed my regret that you should have had such a lonely life, but it hurts me, my dear, to hear you express yourself with such bitterness about those years; there were but two of them, after all.”

“That is true,” she said, recovering herself quickly, “but when one has a great deal of time to think, one changes one’s mind about a great many things, especially balls.”

“That is true, too,” he said, “so long as you are not bitter about it, as I sometimes fear you are inclined to be, my dear.”

“Not bitter at all,” she cried, with a smile that quivered a little on her lip. She got up and stood at the window, with her back to him, looking out upon the moor. The clouds were hanging low, almost touching the hills, the sky so heavy that it seemed to be closing down, in one deep tone of gray, upon the dumb, unresisting earth. “I hope,” said Lily, “that they will get home before the snow comes down.” She stood there for some time looking out upon that scene, which had seen so much. “It was the year of that dreadful snow-storm,” the girl had said. And the ball to which they had asked her was on the anniversary of her wedding day.

CHAPTER XLIII

It did not snow that year: the weather was mild and wet. There was not the exhilaration, the mystery, the clear-breathing chill, of the snow, the great gorgeous sunsets over the purple hills. But the little world was closed in with opaque walls of cloud; the sky low, as if you could almost touch it; the hills absent from the landscape, replaced by banks of watery mist, indefinite, meaning nothing; and all life shut up within the enclosure, where there was shelter to be had, and warmth, if nothing else. It was thus that the anniversary of Lily’s honeymoon passed by. Her mind was like the sky, covered by heavy mists, falling low, as if there were no longer earth and heaven, but only a land of darkness and of despair between. Behind these mists all her existence had disappeared. Her child, perhaps, was there, her husband was there, the woman she might have been was there, so was the old Lily, the girl full of laughter and flying thoughts, full of quick resolutions and plans and infinite hope. The woman who stood by the window was a woman whom Lily scarcely knew, who did what she had to do mechanically, whether it was ordering Sir Robert’s dinner, or playing piquette with him, or gazing, gazing out of that window before he came down stairs. She gazed, but she looked for no one upon the distant road; her gaze meant nothing, any more than her life did. She had no hope of any thing, scarcely, she thought to herself, any desire left. A ball! to go to a ball! which her uncle thought every one of her age must wish to do. He had been going out to dinner that night; most likely he was going to balls also, about the New Year time, when there were so many in Edinburgh. He could not well get out of it, he would probably say to himself. At the New Year time! the New Year!