ng her
sister away unseen by Willoughby since his marriage, and she looked
forward with hope to what a few months of tranquility at Barton might
do towards restoring Marianne's peace of mind, and confirming her own.

Their journey was safely performed. The second day brought them into
the cherished, or the prohibited, county of Somerset, for as such was
it dwelt on by turns in Marianne's imagination; and in the forenoon of
the third they drove up to Cleveland.

Cleveland was a spacious, modern-built house, situated on a sloping
lawn. It had no park, but the pleasure-grounds were tolerably
extensive; and like every other place of the same degree of
importance, it had its open shrubbery, and closer wood walk, a road of
smooth gravel winding round a plantation, led to the front, the lawn
was dotted over with timber, the house itself was under the
guardianship of the fir, the mountain-ash, and the acacia, and a thick
screen of them altogether, interspersed with tall Lombardy poplars,
shut out the offices.

Marianne entered the house with a heart swelling with emotion from the
consciousness of being only eighty miles from Barton, and not thirty
from Combe Magna; and before she had been five minutes within its
walls, while the others were busily helping Charlotte to show her
child to the housekeeper, she quitted it again, stealing away through
the winding shrubberies, now just beginning to be in beauty, to gain a
distant eminence; where, from its Grecian temple, her eye, wandering
over a wide tract of country to the south-east, could fondly rest on
the farthest ridge of hills in the horizon, and fancy that from their
summits Combe Magna might be seen.

In such moments of precious, invaluable misery, she rejoiced in tears
of agony to be at Cleveland; and as she returned by a different
circuit to the house, feeling all the happy privilege of country
liberty, of wandering from place to place in free and luxurious
solitude, she resolved to spend almost every hour of every day while
she remained with the Palmers, in the indulgence of such solitary
rambles.

[Illustration: _Showing her child to the housekeeper._]

She returned just in time to join the others as they quitted the
house, on an excursion through its more immediate premises; and the
rest of the morning was easily whiled away, in lounging round the
kitchen garden, examining the bloom upon its walls, and listening to
the gardener's lamentations upon blights, in da