In another year she will be forgotten!" Mr.St.John sighed.

Perhaps he felt how much more easily he had been forgotten, were he the banished one, Lucretia the possessor! His light nature, however, soon escaped from all thoughts and sources of annoyance, and he listened with complacent attention to Lady Mary's gentle plans for the poor, and the children's school, and the cottages that ought to be repaired, and the labourers that ought to be employed.
For though it may seem singular, Vernon St.John, insensibly influenced by his wife's meek superiority, and corrected by her pure companionship, had begun to feel the charm of innocent occupations,--more, perhaps, than if he had been accustomed to the larger and loftier excitements of life, and missed that stir of intellect which is the element of those who have warred in the democracy of letters, or contended for the leadership of States.

He had begun already to think that the country was no such exile after all.

Naturally benevolent, he had taught himself to share the occupations his Mary had already found in the busy "luxury of doing good," and to conceive that brotherhood of charity which usually unites the lord of the village with its poor.
"I think, what with hunting once a week,--I will not venture more till my pain in the side is quite gone,--and with the help of some old friends at Christmas, we can get through the winter very well, Mary." "Ah, those old friends, I dread them more than the hunting!" "But we'll have your grave father and your dear, precise, excellent mother to keep us in order.

And if I sit more than half an hour after dinner, the old butler shall pull me out by the ears.