Page:Lady Anne Granard 3.pdf/6

4 this time handsomer than she had ever been before, and externally more resembling her mother than any of her sisters, though she lacked Lady Anne's commanding height and that cast of countenance which indicated powerful intellect, but was unfortunately mingled with pride and superciliousness, which was the extreme reverse of Mary's expression. It might therefore be truly said, that Isabella enjoyed the prospect of her sister's future honourable settlement more than she could do herself, for the wife had not yet learned to scan the good or evil inherent in matrimony with a just eye. She had suffered much, but she could not bring herself to suppose that any part of her experience belonged to the state itself, but to her own peculiar situation, and that of her dear, unhappy husband. The isolated state in which she was now living, far from her country and her friends, shut out from the society in which she had a right to move, of course prevented her from reading in the great book of human life those lessons of life which might have enlarged her views or increased her apprehensions; therefore, she saw nothing before her beloved sister but a course of unmingled and well-merited felicity.

She had still the buoyancy which belongs to girls in their teens, as well as the soberness which arises from experience; and when her spirits were