Crumpled Rose–Leaves.

Violet Tempest had been away from home nearly a year, and to the few old servants remaining at the Abbey House, and to the villagers who had known and loved her, it seemed as if a light had gone out.
“It’s like it was after the Squire’s death, when miss and her ma was away,” said one gossip to another; “the world seems empty.”
Mrs. Winstanley and her husband had been living as became people of some pretension to rank and fashion. They saw very little of each other, but were seen together on all fitting occasions. The morning service in the little church at Beechdale would not have seemed complete without those two figures. The faded beauty in trailing silken draperies and diaphanous bonnet, the slim, well-dressed Captain, with his bronzed face and black whiskers. They were in everybody’s idea the happiest example of married bliss. If the lady’s languid loveliness had faded more within the last year or so than in the ten years that went before it, if her slow step had grown slower, her white hand more transparent, there were no keen loving eyes to mark the change.
“That affectation of valetudinarianism is growing on Mrs. Winstanley,” Mrs. Scobel said one day to her husband. “It is a pity. I believe the Captain encourages it.”
“She has not looked so well since Violet went away,” answered the kindly parson. “It seems an unnatural thing for mother and daughter to be separated.”
“I don’t know that, dear. The Bible says a man should leave mother and father and cleave to his wife. Poor Violet was a discordant element in that household. Mrs. Winstanley must feel much happier now she is away.”
“I can’t tell how she feels,” answered the Vicar doubtfully; “but she does not look so happy as she did when Violet was at home.”
“The fact is she gives way too much,” exclaimed active little Mrs. Scobel, who had never given way in her life. “When she has a head-ache she lies in bed, and has the venetian blinds kept down, just as if she were dying. No wonder she looks pale and ——”
“Etiolated,” said the Vicar; “perishing for want of light. But I believe it’s moral sunshine that is wanted there, my dear Fanny, say what you will.”
Mr. Scobel was correct in his judgment. Pamela Winstanley was a most unhappy woman — an unhappy woman without one tangible cause of complaint. True that her daughter was banished; but she was banished with the mother’s full consent. Her personal extravagances had been curtailed; but she was fain to admit that the curtailment was wise, necessary, and for her own future benefit. Her husband was all kindness; and surely she could not be angry with him if he seemed to grow younger every day — rejuvenated by regular habits and rustic life — while in her wan face the lines of care daily deepened, until it would have needed art far beyond the power of any modern Medea to conceal Time’s ravages. Your modern Medeas are such poor creatures — loathsome as Horace’s Canidia, but without her genius or her power.
“I am getting an old woman,” sighed Mrs. Winstanley. “It is lucky I am not without resources against solitude and age.”
Her resources were a tepid appreciation of modern idyllic poetry, as exemplified in the weaker poems of Tennyson, and the works of Adelaide Proctor and Jean Ingelow, a talent for embroidering conventional foliage and flowers on kitchen towelling, and for the laborious conversion of Nottingham braid into Venetian............