and Lady Anne was in the midst of her arrangements for an archery meeting, when Mr. Granard was found dead in his library. He had not been in bed all night, having been looking over accounts; a half sketched plan of retrenchment was found near, but that night his life was required of him.
Lady Anne could not repress one involuntary exclamation of "what an inconvenient time Mr. Granard had chosen for his death!" but otherwise she behaved with exemplary propriety. She retired to her dressing-room, which was duly darkened, and there she sat, a white cambric handkerchief in one hand, and a bottle of salts in the other.
Most of Mr. Granard's children were too young to feel his loss, but Mary, the eldest, grieved for him with a grief beyond her years. What were his faults to her? she only knew him as the kind father with whom she read and walked, and from whom she never heard an unkind word. In after years, when she heard of his indolence and his improvidence, it sounded to her like sacrilege.
