This was precisely Sister Cecilia's attitude towards her small world of Stagholme, after the news of the young Squire's death had cast a gloom over the whole neighbourhood.
"Ah!" she would say to some honest cottage mother who had more true feeling in her rough little finger than Sister Cecilia possessed in her whole heart. "These trials are sent to us for our good. The ways of Providence are strange, Mrs. Martin--strange to us now."
"Yes, miss; that they be," Mrs. Martin replied, looking at her with the hard and far-seeing gaze of a poor mother who has known trouble in its least romantic form. And Sister Cecilia, with that blindness which comes from systematically closing the eyes to the earthly side of earthly things, never realised that the small change of sympathy is often slightly aggravating.
At this period she took to calling Jem Agar her "poor boy." The grave seems to have the power of completely altering the past, and with persons of the stamp of Sister Cecilia death appears not only to wipe out all sin, but to impair the memory of the living to such an extent that the individuality of the deceased is no longer recognisable.
Jem never had in any sense of the word been her boy. His feelings for her had passed from the distrust of childhood to the lofty contempt of a schoolboy for all things preternaturally virtuous, finally settling down into the more tolerant contempt of manhood. The dead, however, have perforce to accept much affection which they scornfully refused in life.
"Poor Jem!" said Sister Cecilia to Mrs. Agar the day after that lady's visit to Gray's Inn. "I always thought that perhaps he and dear Dora would come to--to some understanding."
She stirred her tea with patient, suffering head inclined at a resigned angle.
"Do you think there _was_ any understanding between them?" inquired Mrs. Agar.
Which, being translated, meant that she would like to say, but did not know.
It had always been a pet scheme of Mrs. Agar's that Dora should marry Arthur; firstly, because she would have nearly two thousand pounds a year on the death of her parents; and, secondly, because she was a capable person with plenty of common-sense. These two adjuncts--namely, money and common-sense--Mrs. Agar wisely looked for in candidates for the flaccid hand of her son.