sion, to which
Mr Hope belonged; another is, the impossibility of travelling,--the
being fixed to one place for life, without any but the shortest
intervals of journeying. Mr Hope had been settled for five years at
Deerbrook; and, during that time, he had scarcely been out of sight of
its steeple. His own active and gladsome mind had kept him happy among
his occupations. There was no one in the place with whom he could hold
equal converse; but, while he had it not, he did not feel the pressing
want of it. He loved his profession, and it kept him busy. His kind
heart was ever full of interest for his poorer patients. Seeing the
best side of everybody, he could be entertained, though sometimes vexed,
by his intercourse with the Greys and Rowlands. Then there was the
kindly-tempered and gentlemanly rector; and Philip Enderby often came
down for a few weeks; and Mr Hope had the chief management of the Book
Society, and could thus see the best new books; and his professional
rides lay through a remarkably pretty country.

He kept up a punctual and copious correspondence with the members of his
own family,--with his married sisters, and with his only brother, now
with his regiment in India,--relating to them every important
circumstance of his lot, and almost every interesting feeling of his
heart. With this variety of resources, life had passed away cheerily,
on the whole, with Mr Hope, for the five years of his residence at
Deerbrook; though there were times when he wondered whether it was to be
always thus,--whether he was to pass to his grave without any higher or
deeper human intercourses than he had here. If it had been possible, he
might, like other men as wise as himself, have invested some one of the
young ladies of Deerbrook with imaginary attributes, and have fallen in
love with a creature of his own fancy. But it really was not possible.
There was no one of the young ladies of Deerbrook who was not so far
inferior to the women of Hope's own family,--to the mother he had lost,
and the sisters who were settled far away,--as to render this commonest
of all delusions impossible to him.

To such a man, so circumstanced, it may be imagined how great an event
was the meeting with Hester and Margaret. He could not be in their
presence ten minutes without becoming aware of their superiority to
every woman he had seen for five years past. The beauty of the one, the
sincerity and unconsciousness of the other, an