MABEL'S PROGRESS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF "AUNT MARGARET'S TROUBLE."
                             BOOK I.
                CHAPTER XI. PROJECTS.

TROUBLE, indeed, had come to Jessamine
Cottage, and the suddenness of the blow had
nearly overwhelmed the newly bereaved widow.

It is true that Mrs. Saxelby had felt no
passionate love for her husband; but she had clung
to him with confidence, and hers was a nature
that suffered acutely from the wrenching away of
any support. She had been grateful to Mr.
Saxelby for his love for her, for his protection,
and for the release he had afforded her from a
dull oppressive tyranny, in taking her away from
the old woman whose humble companion she
had been when he married her. Then, too, she
felt that her worldly position would now be a
very precarious one, and that the comfortable
ease in which she had been living for these
five years past, must give place to care and
poverty. It was in a dumb unacknowledged
way that this thought lay in her mind; and she
would have repudiated with anger the idea
that such considerations weighed with her at
such a moment. Nevertheless, the considerations
were there.

All Mabel's care at present was to soothe
and comfort her mother as much as
possible. Friendly services were not wanting to
them. The family at Bramley Manor were kind
in word and deed. So were several directors of the
company in whose employ Mr. Saxelby had been
so long. Mr. Charlewood himself relieved the
widow from all the sad and depressing details
of the last ceremony that mortality can claim
from its fellow-creatures. But then came the
time—perhaps the hardest to bear—when
blind grief could no longer be indulged and
excused; when the shutters must be unbolted, and
the windows opened wide, and light and air let
in once more upon the dark desolate rooms; and
the noises of the outside world must come
jarring in upon the silence, and when the hushed
speech and noiseless tread of friends and
servants must give place to the ordinary busy
sounding traffic of life. If God's world would
only mourn with her, thought Mrs. Saxelby; if
the sun would cease from shining, and the birds
from chirping, and the dry autumn leaves from
dancing in the eddying dust; if a soft perpetual
twilight would reign in the sky, and a soft
perpetual hush upon the earth; then her
grief would not be so hard to bear, nor her
desolation seem so out of tune with the
importunate life around her. But this could not
be. Gradually, as was inevitable, she was roused
from the lethargy of sorrow, and began to feel
that the blood still ran in her veins, and that
for her, as for the rest of humanity, Time's
touch could heal as well as wound.

Mr. Saxelby had saved in his bachelor
days, but not so much as many of his
acquaintances had expected and believed. It is
hard to say why they should have imagined him
to have laid by any considerable sum of money,
seeing that his salary was not large, and that its
amount was pretty well known to all his
acquaintances. Since his marriage he had lived
up to his income; but he had insured his
life for a sum which, judiciously invested, would
realise about forty pounds a year. Besides this,
there was the long lease of a little cottage and
garden, a mile or two out of Hammerham, and
there were a few shares in the gas company
whose clerk he had been.

Mr. Saxelby left a will bequeathing everything
of which he died possessed, absolutely to
his widow. His executors were Mr. Charlewood
and the Reverend Decimus Fluke.

These gentlemen were sitting one evening
about a week after the funeral, in the little room
which Mrs. Saxelby had been accustomed to
consider her own especial domain. It was quite dark.
The shutters were closed, and the muslin curtains
were drawn across them. A bright fire blazed
in the grate, and the lamp, carefully shaded—
for Mrs. Saxelby's eyes were weak with weeping,
and could not endure a glare of light—
stood on a little table behind her arm-chair.
Mr. Charlewood had taken his place on the sofa
opposite to the widow, and sat there with his
legs crossed, and his hands spread out on the
centre table before him, as he explained to her
the position of her worldly affairs, and
emphasised each paragraph of his discourse by
gently raising his outspread palms, and letting
them fail again.

Mr. Fluke, whose vivacious energy seldom
permitted him to be still for two minutes
together, stood with his back to the fire, and his
hands beneath his coat-tails: a position which
he constantly varied by sticking his thumbs
into his waistcoat-pockets, playing with his