began to supersede fear, as my spirits returned.

Meanwhile Major Hockin was making no sign as to what had befallen him
in Paris, or what Cosmopolitan Jack was about. But, strangely enough,
he had sent me a letter from Bruntsea instead of Paris, and addressed
in grand style to no less a person than "The right honorable Baroness
Castlewood"--a title which I had resolved, for the present, neither to
claim nor acknowledge. In that letter the Major mingled a pennyweight
of condolence with more congratulation than the post could carry for the
largest stamp yet invented. His habit of mind was to magnify things; and
he magnified my small grandeur, and seemed to think nothing else worthy
of mention.

Through love of the good kind cousin I had lost, even more than through
common and comely respect toward the late head of the family, I felt it
impossible to proceed, for the present, with any inquiries, but left
the next move to the other side. And the other side made it, in a manner
such as I never even dreamed of.

About three weeks after I became, in that sad way, the mistress,
escaping one day from lawyers and agents, who held me in dreary
interview, with long computations of this and of that, and formalities
almost endless, I went, for a breath of good earnest fresh air, beyond
precinct of garden or shrubbery. To me these seemed in mild weather to
temper and humanize the wind too strictly, and take the wild spirit out
of it; and now, for the turn of the moment, no wind could be too rough
to tumble in. After long months of hard trouble, and worry, and fear,
and sad shame, and deep sorrow, the natural spring of clear youth into
air and freedom set me upward. For the nonce there was nothing upon my
selfish self to keep it downward; troubles were bubbles, and grief a
low thief, and reason almost treason. I drank the fine fountain of air
unsullied, and the golden light stamped with the royalty of sun.

Hilarious moments are but short, and soon cold sense comes back again.
Already I began to feel ashamed of young life's selfish outburst, and
the vehement spring of mere bodily health. On this account I sat down
sadly in a little cove of hill, whereto the soft breeze from the river
came up, with a tone of wavelets, and a sprightly water-gleam. And here,
in fern and yellow grass and tufted bights of bottom growth, the wind
made entry for the sun, and they played with one another.

Besting here, and thinking, with my face between