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216 more deeply conscious that his was not the home for his drooping and delicate flower; and when she died—died of that insidious disease which so mocks with the semblance of hope when hope there is none—he forgot that the breath of consumption also fades the cheek that sleeps beneath the purple, and that the highest and noblest have to deplore over their loveliest and best. With that proneness to accuse our own peculiar lot of whatever may be its sorrow, he blamed the circumstances in which he was placed, and said, "If I had been wealthy, Lucy had not died." And when—the very image of her over the headstone of whose grave the moss was growing grey—another Lucy grew up to dwell within his home, how did he delight in lavishing on her every luxury! and said within himself, "Shew me a lady in the land that has her heart's wish more than my child; and her dower—there are few amid the ruined gentry around but would be thankful for a tithe of the broad pieces, or a few roods of the broad lands, that will be hers."

And yet Lucy thought her father neglected her—at least, that he took no pleasure in her society; and, naturally shy, she often shrunk from offering those thousand little acts of affection which make the enjoyment of daily life, and which, indeed, would have made the happiness of theirs.