er village nor
farmhouse, nor cottage: I should have quailed in the absence of
moonlight, for it was by the leading of stars only I traced the dim
path; I should have quailed still more in the unwonted presence of that
which to-night shone in the north, a moving mystery--the Aurora
Borealis. But this solemn stranger influenced me otherwise than through
my fears. Some new power it seemed to bring. I drew in energy with the
keen, low breeze that blew on its path. A bold thought was sent to my
mind; my mind was made strong to receive it.

"Leave this wilderness," it was said to me, "and go out hence."

"Where?" was the query.

I had not very far to look; gazing from this country parish in that
flat, rich middle of England--I mentally saw within reach what I had
never yet beheld with my bodily eyes: I saw London.

The next day I returned to the hall, and asking once more to see the
housekeeper, I communicated to her my plan.

Mrs. Barrett was a grave, judicious woman, though she knew little more
of the world than myself; but grave and judicious as she was, she did
not charge me with being out of my senses; and, indeed, I had a staid
manner of my own which ere now had been as good to me as cloak and hood
of hodden grey, since under its favour I had been enabled to achieve
with impunity, and even approbation, deeds that, if attempted with an
excited and unsettled air, would in some minds have stamped me as a
dreamer and zealot.

The housekeeper was slowly propounding some difficulties, while she
prepared orange-rind for marmalade, when a child ran past the window
and came bounding into the room. It was a pretty child, and as it
danced, laughing, up to me--for we were not strangers (nor, indeed, was
its mother--a young married daughter of the house--a stranger)--I took
it on my knee.

Different as were our social positions now, this child's mother and I
had been schoolfellows, when I was a girl of ten and she a young lady
of sixteen; and I remembered her, good-looking, but dull, in a lower
class than mine.

I was admiring the boy's handsome dark eyes, when the mother, young
Mrs. Leigh, entered. What a beautiful and kind-looking woman was the
good-natured and comely, but unintellectual, girl become! Wifehood and
maternity had changed her thus, as I have since seen them change others
even less promising than she. Me she had forgotten. I was changed too,
though not, I fear, for the better. I made no attempt to recall my