ast had thy labour for thy pains?' says Mrs. Golding, smiling
as one well pleased.

'Not altogether,' said Andrew, 'for the Squire wills us to turn into the
byway here, and keep from the high road awhile, lest we meet the baser
rascals coming back, in all their fury and disappointment.'

'Good counsel,' said Mrs. Golding; 'we will take it.' And so we kept to
that byway for a mile or so; and it was rough uneasy riding, though a
pretty green lane enough.

Althea said to me half aside, 'We had had none of these discomforts, if
we had ridden as we were wont with our father, in a good coach like
gentlewomen, and not a-horseback in the country fashion;' the first
discontented word she had said, and Mrs. Golding hearing it,--

'Child,' said she, 'I cannot away with these coaches, they are proud
lazy inventions, and nothing like so wholesome as this our old country
fashion of travelling;' at which Althea blushed and said nothing more,
and Mrs. Golding began pleasantly to chide Andrew for his hazarding of
our safety as he had done, which had put Althea into these discontents;
and he hung his head, smiling, and had not a word to say for himself. I
should scarce have remembered this accident, or Andrew's behaviour on
it, had it not been for things that befell after.

I was heartily weary of journeying by the time we got to West Fazeby;
the way was long, the manner of travelling new to me, I had not so much
as slept at an inn before, our former home being no great distance from
town; and my company was not such as to shorten the way, for Aunt
Golding was the only frank and cheerful-spoken person in our party,
Althea behaving, as I told her, like an enchanted princess in a fairy
tale, so melancholy, proud, and silent, and Andrew being so dashed with
her stately ways that the poor youth was not less tongue-tied than she.
So I was glad indeed when we rode out of York one fine morning, and Mrs.
Golding told us we must reach her house before the day was out; in which
she said no more than truth.

She having always talked of it as a poor farmhouse, our surprise was not
little when we saw it at last. It stands a little away from the
village; it is no great house, but is a right fair one to my thinking,
built of red brick, with a great deal of wood, handsomely carved, about
the gables and the porch; it is much grown with ivy, at which our aunt
would often rail, but I think for all that she loved it, seeing it makes
the house green an