She told herself that she was doing what was good for others as well as for herself;--what would be very good for her father, and what should be good, if it might be within her power to make it so, for him who was to be her husband.

The blackness of the cloud of her brother's death would never altogether pass away from her.

It had tended, as she knew well, to make her serious, grave, and old, in spite of her own efforts to the contrary.

The cloud had been so black with her that it had nearly lost for her the prize which was now her own.

But she told herself that that blackness was an injury to her, and not a benefit, and that it had now become a duty to her,--for his sake, if not for her own,--to dispel its shadows rather than encourage them.