dy Bountiful, in which she well
fulfilled old visions of the mistress of an English home, but still more
did he dwell upon her gentleness, and on that shadowy resemblance to his
mother, which made him long for some of that tenderness which she
lavished upon Owen. He looked for no more than her uniformly kind
civility and hospitality, but he was always wishing to know her better;
and any touch of warmth and affection in her manner towards him was so
delightful that he could not help telling Phoebe of it, in their next
brief _tete-a-tete_.

He was able to render a great service to Miss Charlecote. Mr. Brooks's
understanding had not cleared with time, and the accounts that had been
tangled in summer were by the end of the year in confusion worse
confounded. He was a faithful servant, but his accounts had always been
audited every month, and in his old age, his arithmetic would not carry
him farther, so that his mistress's long absence abroad had occasioned
such a hopeless chaos, that but for his long services, his honesty might
have been in question. Honora put this idea away with angry horror. Not
only did she love and trust the old man, but he was a legacy from
Humfrey, and she would have torn the page from her receipts rather than
rouse the least suspicion against him. Yet she could not bear to leave
any flaw in Humfrey's farm books, and she toiled and perplexed herself in
vain; till Owen, finding out what distressed her, and grieving at his own
incapacity, begged that Randolf might help her; when behold! the confused
accounts arranged themselves in comprehensible columns, and poor old
Brooks was proved to have cheated himself so much more than his lady as
to be entirely exonerated from all but puzzle-headedness. The young
man's farmer life qualified him to be highly popular at the Holt. He was
curious about English husbandry, talked to the labourers, and tried their
tools with no unpractised hand, even the flail which Honor's hatred of
steam still kept as the winter's employment in the barn; he appreciated
the bullocks, criticized the sheep, and admired the pigs, till the
farming men agreed 'there had not been such an one about the place since
the Squire himself.'

Honora might be excused for not having detected a likeness between the
two Humfreys. Scarcely a feature was in the same mould, the complexion
was different, and the heavily-built, easy-going Squire, somewhat behind
his own century, had apparently h