he name of
Providence, should mine be like it? Nay, Margaret, why these tears?
For their sake I will tell you--and then we shall have talked quite
enough about me--that you are no fair judge of my lot. You see me
often, generally, in the midst of annoyance, and you do not (because no
one can) look with the eye of my mind upon the future. If you could,
for one day and night, feel with my feelings, and see through my
eyes--."

"Oh, that I could! I should be the holier for ever after?"

"Nay, nay! but if you could do this, you would know, from henceforth,
that there are glimpses of heaven for me in solitude, as for you in
love; and that it is almost as good to look forward without fear of
chance or change, as with such a flutter of hope as is stirring in you
now. So much for the solitaries of the earth, and because Providence
should be justified of his children. Now, when is this family meeting
to take place in the corner-house?"

"Frank hopes to land in August; and Anne, Mrs Gilchrist, will meet him
as soon as she can hear, in her by-corner of the world, of his arrival.
The other sister is still abroad, and cannot come. I hope Anne may be a
friend to you--an intimate. Judging by her brothers, and her own
letters, I think she must be worthy."

"Thank you; but you are, and ever will be, my intimate. There can be no
other. We shall be often seeing you here."

"Sometimes; and we shall have you with us."

"No: I cannot come to London. I shall never leave this place again, I
believe; but you will be often coming to it. When that crowd of new
graves in the churchyard shall be waving with grass, and those old woods
looking more ancient still, and the grown people of Deerbrook telling
their little ones all about the pestilence that swept the place at the
end of the great scarcity, when _they_ were children, you and yours, and
perhaps I, may sit, a knot of grey-headed friends, and hear over again
about those good old days of ours, as we shall then call them."

"And tell how there was an aged man, who told us of his seeing the deer
come down through the forest to drink at the brook. I should like to
behold those future days."

"And to remember whose face you saw in the torchlight, at the time and
place of your hearing the old man's tale. Whose horse do I hear
stopping at the stable?"

"It is Philip's. He has galloped home before the rest," said Margaret,
drawing back from the window with the smile still upo