she would not cry before Sir Edward, and she wished to know Mrs. Margaret very much."
"How is Helen, dear Georgiana? I know she is gone out with Mrs. Palmer, or I should have begged to see her, and yet it is better I should not; but how is she?"
"Much better in health; indeed she is well, and looking well, but her spirits are not good in general, and just now she feels much for me, for all of us."
Lord Meersbrook pressed Georgiana's hand convulsively, touched her cheek with his lips, and muttered something in which the word sister was alone distinct, sprang into his cab, and was gone.
"Mamma has consented, yet never told me; what can be the meaning of this? She has always an intention in every thing she does or lets alone. Alas! my fate is in far different hands to hers, and compared to which she is an atom; but I cannot see her now. I will read the prayers for those at sea, in my own room."
Georgiana pursued her way, repeating, as she climbed the many stairs, "He stilleth the raging of the sea, He maketh the storm to cease, so that the waves thereof are still," and she certainly felt a trust in Providence strangely contrasting itself with fear of her mother—a kind of dread that should Arthur, in answer to the prayers of the good, be mercifully spared, still Lady Anne might wrest her from his
