Chapter 2

Hannah did not, however, die; although her left arm was broken, her shoulder dislocated, and much injury inflicted by the fall. She lived, and she still lives, but no longer as the Beauty of the Village. Her fine shape injured by the blow, and her fair face disfigured by the smallpox, she can no longer boast the surpassing loveliness which obtained for her the title of the Rose of Aberleigh. And yet she has gained more than she has lost, even in mere attraction; the vain coquettish girl is become a sweet and gentle woman; gaiety has been replaced by sensibility, and the sauciness of conscious power, by the modest wish to please. In her long and dangerous illness, her slow and doubtful convalescence, Hannah learnt the difficult lesson to acknowledge and to amend her own faults; and when, after many scruples on the score of her changed person and impaired health, she became the happy wife of James Meadows, she brought to him, in a corrected temper and purified heart, a dowry far more precious in his mind than the transient beauty which had been her only charm in the eyes of Edward Forester.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Beauty Of The Village, by Mary Russell Mitford