138 The Trotter. 



Blie was now elevated. She soon found that she had given her hand 

 to a man who, as his friends pleasantly used to observe among them- 

 selves, "could not live another mile at the pace he was then going," 

 and had come down to an estate heavily encumbered, to preside 

 over a house which was now the resort of all the spendthrifts and 

 broken-down sporting men in the county. But she never quailed 

 • — the greater the perils which menaced her husband, the greater 

 pride did she feel in helping to extricate him from them j and, like 

 a true woman, her courage rose as fresh difficulty after difficulty 

 stared her in the face. It was nothing to her that not a lady in the 

 neighbourhood ever noticed or called upon her 3 it was nothing to 

 her that when in her visits to the little neighbouring market-town 

 the county ladies whom she met crossed over the road, or gave her 

 the path with a chilling politeness and a cold haughty stare such as 

 only high-bred ladies can assume — God help them ! Judged fairly 

 by their intrinsic merits, there was hardly one among them who 

 could hold a candle to her. Kind and generous in her disposition, 

 warm-hearted almost to a fault, with a character as stainless as her 

 brow, grateful to her husband for having rescued her from the pollu- 

 tion of low London life, and dragged her from an existence which 

 she detested and abhorred, she loved him with all the fervour of a 

 woman's passion, and she had now but one sole aim in life, to 

 endeavour to render herself worthy of the position to which he had 

 raised her. She soon saw his faults, but she never blamed him. 

 She had been brought up in a hard school, but a school in which 

 she had good opportunities of reading the human heart 5 and if but 

 few gleams of sunshine had hitherto illuminated her rugged path, she 

 had studied the dark side of life in all its phases. She saw at once 

 that it was in vain to endeavour to clean the '^Augean stable " at a 

 single sweep. She knew that complaints and remonstrances would 

 avail her nothing. She saw that her only chance of accomplishing 

 the task was by kindness, affection, and patience, and she set about that 

 task with a tact peculiarly her own. She never reproached her husband 

 for excesses which she had not the power to stem. She never 

 looked coldly upon his dissolute and abandoned friends 3 she received 



