Page:Gaskell - North and South, vol. II, 1855.djvu/141

 "My dear child, how you are shivering!" said her father, a few minutes afterwards. "You must go to bed directly. You have turned quite pale!"

Margaret did not refuse to go, though she was loth to leave her father alone. She needed the relief of solitude after a day of busy thinking, and busier repenting.

But she seemed much as usual the next day; the lingering gravity and sadness, and the occasional absence of mind, were not unnatural symptoms in the early days of grief. And almost in proportion to her re-establishment in health, was her father's relapse into his abstracted musing upon the wife he had lost, and the past era in his life that was closed to him for ever.