help will come; but a soul lost, outside of one method of existence,
withdrawn from the other, knowing no way to retrace its steps, nor how
help can come! There had been no bitterness in passing from earth to the
land where she had gone; but now there came upon her soul, in all the
power of her new faculties, the bitterness of death. The place which was
hers she had forsaken and left, and the place that had been hers knew her
no more.




VII.


Mary, when she left her kind friend in the vicarage, went out and took a
long walk. She had received a shock so great that it took all sensation
from her, and threw her into the seething and surging of an excitement
altogether beyond her control. She could not think until she had got
familiar with the idea, which indeed had been vaguely shaping itself in
her mind ever since she had emerged from the first profound gloom and
prostration of the shadow of death. She had never definitely thought of
her position before,--never even asked herself what was to become of her
when Lady Mary died. She did not see, any more than Lady Mary did, why
she should ever die; and girls, who have never wanted anything in their
lives, who have had no sharp experience to enlighten them, are slow to
think upon such subjects. She had not expected anything; her mind had not
formed any idea of inheritance; and it had not surprised her to hear of
the earl, who was Lady Mary's natural heir, nor to feel herself separated
from the house in which all her previous life had been passed. But there
had been gradually dawning upon her a sense that she had come to a crisis