cut through the furze than you can go with
long clothes; so we won't trouble you to wait."

"Very well--are you ready, Olly?"

"Yes, ma'am. And there's a light shining from your niece's window, see.
It will help to keep us in the path."

She indicated the faint light at the bottom of the valley which Fairway
had pointed out; and the two women descended the tumulus.

4--The Halt on the Turnpike Road

Down, downward they went, and yet further down--their descent at each
step seeming to outmeasure their advance. Their skirts were scratched
noisily by the furze, their shoulders brushed by the ferns, which,
though dead and dry, stood erect as when alive, no sufficient winter
weather having as yet arrived to beat them down. Their Tartarean
situation might by some have been called an imprudent one for two
unattended women. But these shaggy recesses were at all seasons a
familiar surrounding to Olly and Mrs. Yeobright; and the addition of
darkness lends no frightfulness to the face of a friend.

"And so Tamsin has married him at last," said Olly, when the incline
had become so much less steep that their foot-steps no longer required
undivided attention.

Mrs. Yeobright answered slowly, "Yes; at last."

"How you will miss her--living with 'ee as a daughter, as she always
have."

"I do miss her."

Olly, though without the tact to perceive when remarks were untimely,
was saved by her very simplicity from rendering them offensive.
Questions that would have been resented in others she could ask with
impunity. This accounted for Mrs. Yeobright's acquiescence in the
revival of an evidently sore subject.

"I was quite strook to hear you'd agreed to it, ma'am, that I was,"
continued the besom-maker.

"You were not more struck by it than I should have been last year this
time, Olly. There are a good many sides to that wedding. I could not
tell you all of them, even if I tried."

"I felt myself that he was hardly solid-going enough to mate with your
family. Keeping an inn--what is it? But 'a's clever, that's true, and
they say he was an engineering gentleman once, but has come down by
being too outwardly given."

"I saw that, upon the whole, it would be better she should marry where
she wished."

"Poor little thing, her feelings got the better of her, no doubt. 'Tis
nature. Well, they may call him what they will--he've several acres
of heth-ground broke up here, besides the public house, and the
heth-croppers