white
cliffs, the sight of the white cliffs revived pleasant thoughts of
Riversley, and thoughts of Riversley thoughts of Janet, which were
singularly and refreshingly free from self-accusations. Some love for my
home, similar to what one may have for Winter, came across me, and some
appreciation of Janet as well, in whose society was sure to be at least
myself, a creature much reduced in altitude, but without the cramped
sensations of a man on a monument. My hearty Janet! I thanked her then
for seeing me of my natural height.

Some hours after parting with my father in London, I lay down to sleep in
my old home, feeling as if I had thrown off a coat of armour. I awoke
with a sailor's song on my lips. Looking out of window at the well-known
features of the heaths and dark firs, and waning oak copses, and the
shadowy line of the downs stretching their long whale backs South to
West, it struck me that I had been barely alive of late. Indeed one who
consents to live as I had done, in a hope and a retrospect, will find his
life slipping between the two, like the ships under the striding
Colossus. I shook myself, braced myself, and saluted every one at the
breakfast table with the frankness of Harry Richmond. Congratulated on my
splendid spirits, I was confirmed in the idea that I enjoyed them, though
I knew of something hollow which sent an echo through me at intervals.
Janet had become a fixed inmate of the house. 'I've bought her, and I
shall keep her; she's the apple of my eye,' said the squire, adding with
characteristic scrupulousness, 'if apple's female.' I asked her whether
she had heard from Temple latterly. 'No; dear little fellow!' cried she,
and I saw in a twinkling what it was that the squire liked in her, and
liked it too. I caught sight of myself, as through a rift of cloud,
trotting home from the hunt to a glad, frank, unpretending mate, with
just enough of understanding to look up to mine. For a second or so it
was pleasing, as a glance out of his library across hill and dale will be
to a strained student. Our familiarity sanctioned a comment on the growth
of her daughter-of-the-regiment moustache, the faintest conceivable
suggestion of a shadow on her soft upper lip, which a poet might have
feigned to have fallen from her dark thick eyebrows.

'Why, you don't mean to say, Hal, it's not to your taste?' said the
squire.

'No,' said I, turning an eye on my aunt Dorothy, 'I've loved it all my
life.'

The