eat comfort to have some one to
protect me. On the other hand, how would this bear upon my own freedom
of looking about, my desire to make my own occasions, and the need of
going every where? Could these be kept to my liking at all while an
unknown power lay in kind regard of me? Considering these things, I
begged my cousin to leave me to my own devices, for that I was afraid
of nobody on earth, while only seeking justice, and that England must
be worse than the worst parts of America if any harm to me could be
apprehended at quiet times and in such a quiet place.

My cousin said no more upon that point, though I felt that he was not in
any way convinced; but he told me that he thought I should pay a little
visit, if only for a day, such as I treated him with, to my good friends
at Bruntsea, before I returned to Shoxford. There was no one now
at Bruntsea whom I might not wish to meet, as he knew by a trifling
accident; and after all the kind services rendered by Major and Mrs.
Hockin, it was hardly right to let them begin to feel themselves
neglected. Now the very same thing had occurred to me, and I was going
to propose it; and many things which I found it hard to do without were
left in my little chest of locked-up drawers there. But of that, to my
knowledge, I scarcely thought twice; whereas I longed to see and have
a talk with dear "Aunt Mary." Now, since my affairs had been growing so
strange, and Lord Castlewood had come forward--not strongly, but still
quite enough to speak of--there had been a kind-hearted and genuine wish
at Bruntsea to recover me. And this desire had unreasonably grown while
starved with disappointment. The less they heard of me, the more they
imagined in their rich good-will, and the surer they became that, after
all, there was something in my ideas.

But how could I know this, without any letters from them, since letters
were a luxury forbidden me at Shoxford? I knew it through one of the
simplest and commonest of all nature's arrangements. Stixon's boy,
as every body called him (though he must have been close upon
five-and-twenty, and carried a cane out of sight of the windows), being
so considered, and treated boyishly by the maids of Castlewood, asserted
his dignity, and rose above his value as much as he had lain below it,
by showing that he owned a tender heart, and them that did not despise
it. For he chanced to be walking with his cane upon the beach (the very
morning after he first