to the sun, she concluded that the
family breakfast hour was past. Everything strange again! At Ivy Lodge
the breakfast hour lasted till the lagging members of the family had
all come down; and here there was no family! How could happiness belong
to anybody in such circumstances? The prospect within doors, Eleanor
suddenly remembered, was yet more interesting than the view without.
She eat her breakfast and dressed and went down.

But to find the room where she had been the evening before, was more
than her powers were equal to. Going from one passage to another,
turning and turning back, afraid to open doors to ask somebody; Eleanor
was quite bewildered, when she happily was met by her aunt. The morning
kiss and greeting renewed in her heart all the peace of last night.

"I cannot find my way about in your house, aunt Caxton. It seems a
labyrinth."

"It will not seem so long. Let me shew you the way out of it."

Through one or two more turnings Mrs. Caxton led her niece, and opening
a door took her out at the other side, the back of the house, where
Eleanor's eyes had not been. Here there was a sort of covered gallery,
extending to some length under what was either an upper piazza or the
projection of the second story floor. The ground was paved with tiles
as usual, and wooden settles stood along the wall, and plain stone
pillars supported the roof. But as Eleanor's eyes went out further she
caught her aunt's hand in ecstasy.

From almost the edge of the covered gallery, a little terraced garden
sloped down to the edge of a small river. The house stood on a bank
above the river, at a commanding height; and on the river's further
shore a rich sweep of meadow and pasture land stretched to the right
and left and filled the whole breadth of the valley; on the other side
of which, right up from the green fields, rose another line of hills.
These were soft, swelling, round-topped hills, very different in their
outlines from those in another quarter which Eleanor had been enjoying
from her window. It was winter now, and the garden had lost its glory;
yet Eleanor could see, for her eye was trained in such matters, that
good and excellent care was at home in it; and some delicate things
were there for which a slight protection had been thought needful. The
river was lost to view immediately at the right; it wound down from the
other hand through the rich meadows under a thick embowering bosky
growth of trees; and just belo