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Whereupon her tears had come, and she had felt better.
"Ever so much more. Couldn't carry on at all, whereas he'll get on fine with the impeachable one," said Sir Arthur, and proved to be right, as usual.
[3]
For several years, Anthony Calderton lived almost happily in the shadow and society, the nurture and admonition, of Miss Mary Stuart, kindest and most understanding of governesses, and everything that Sir Arthur and Lady Calderton believed her to be.
All and a little more.
For Miss Mary Stuart, like so many other sane people, had a delightful and savingly mad corner to her well-ordered, disciplined and regulated mind. Her madness to some degree resembled that of a certain Mr. Dick, for upon the horizon of her blameless maiden life there hovered, in rare visions by day and occasional dreams by night, the head of the Martyr King.
When, for some usually inexplicable reason, Miss Stuart was visited by nightmare, she invariably beheld, with an inexpressible cold horror, King Charles's head, held aloft, alive, dripping, while the coarse voice of the brutal executioner boomed forth from beneath his mask,