had done
leaning back in her chair, and had taken up her pen again, she was
disturbed by painful sounds from Mrs Rowland's garden. The lady's own
Matilda, and precious George, and darling Anna, were now pronounced to
be naughty, wilful, mischievous, and, finally, to be combined together
to break their mamma's heart. It was clear that they were receiving the
discharge of the wrath which was caused by somebody else. Now a wail,
now a scream of passion, went to Maria's heart. She hastened on with
her letter, in the hope that Mrs Rowland would presently go into the
house, when the little sufferers might be invited into the schoolroom,
to hear a story, or have their ruffled tempers calmed by some other such
simple means.

"What a life of discipline this is!" thought Maria. "We all have it,
sooner or later. These poor children are beginning early. If one can
but help them through it! There she goes in, and shuts the door behind
her! Now I may call them hither, and tell them something or another
about Una and her lion."

At the well-known sound of Miss Young's lame step, the little ones all
came about her. One ashamed face was hid on her shoulder; another was
relieved of its salt tears; and the boy's pout was first relaxed, and
then forgotten.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

FAMILY CORRESPONDENCE.

From the time of the great event of the arrival of the Miss Ibbotsons,
Mr Hope had longed to communicate all connected with it to his family.
As often as Hester looked eminently beautiful, he wished his sisters
could see her. As often as he felt his spirit moved and animated by his
conversations with Margaret, he thought of Frank, and wished that the
poor fellow could for a day exchange the heats and fatigues, and vapid
society, of which he complained as accompaniments of service in India,
for some one of the wood and meadow rambles, or garden frolics, which
were the summer pleasures of Deerbrook, now unspeakably enhanced by the
addition lately made to its society. Frank wrote that the very names of
meadows and kine, of cowslips, trout, and harriers, were a refreshment
to a soldier's fancy, when the heats, and the solitude of spirit in
which he was compelled to live, made him weary of the novelties which
had at first pleased him in the East. He begged that Edward would go on
to write as he did of everything that passed in the village--of
everything which could make him for a whole evening fancy himself in
Deerbrook, and re