CHAPTER XVIII.
'AND COME AGEN BE IT BY NIGHT OR DAY.' Those winter months were unutterably dreary for Lady Mary Haselden.

She felt weighed down by a sense of death and woe near at hand.

The horror of that dreadful moment in which she found her grandmother lying senseless on the ground, the terror of that distorted countenance, those starting eyes, that stertorous breathing, was not easily banished from a vivid girlish imagination; seeing how few distractions there were to divert Mary's thoughts, and how the sun sank and rose again upon the same inevitable surroundings, to the same monotonous routine.
Her grandmother was kinder than she had been in days gone by, less inclined to find fault; but Mary knew that her society gave Lady Maulevrier very little pleasure, that she could do hardly anything towards filling the gap made by Lesbia's absence.

There was no one to scold her, no one to quarrel with her.

Fraeulein Mueller lectured her mildly from time to time; but that stout German was too lazy to put any force or fire into her lectures.