came, and, thanks to the holiday spirit of a wedding week, for a
long day. Delicious are the pleasures of those whose appetite for them
is whetted by abstinence. Charming, wholly charming, was this day to
Maria, spent in quiet, free from the children, free from the observation
of other guests, passed in all external luxury, and in sister-like
confidence with the friend to whom she had owed some of the best
pleasures of the last year. Margaret was no less happy in indulging
her, and in opening much more of her heart to her than she could to any
one else since Hester married--which now, at the end of six days, seemed
a long time ago.

Miss Young came early, that she might see the house, and everything in
it, before dark; and the days were now at their shortest. She did not
mind the fatigue of mounting to the very top of the house. She must see
the view from the window of Morris's attic. Yesterday's fall of snow
had made the meadows one sheet of white; and the river looked black, and
the woods somewhat frowning and dismal; but those who knew the place so
well could imagine what all this must be in summer; and Morris was
assured that her room was the pleasantest in the house. Morris
curtseyed and smiled, and did not say how cold and dreary a wide
landscape appeared to her, and how much better she should have liked to
look out upon a street, if only Mr Hope had happened to have been
settled in Birmingham. She pointed out to Maria how good Miss Hester
had been, in thinking about the furnishing of this attic. She had taken
the trouble to have the pictures of Morris's father and mother, which
had always hung opposite her bed at Birmingham, brought hither, and
fixed up in the same place. The bed-hangings had come, too; so that,
except for its being so much lighter, and the prospect from the window
so different, it was almost like the same room she had slept in for
three-and-twenty years before. When Maria looked at "the pictures"--
silhouettes taken from shadows on the wall, with numerous little
deformities and disproportions incident to that method of taking
likenesses--she appreciated Hester's thoughtfulness; though she fully
agreed in what Margaret said, that if Morris was willing to leave a
place where she had lived so many years, for the sake of remaining with
Hester and her, it was the least they could do to make her feel as much
at home as possible in her new abode.

Margaret's own chamber was one of the prett