ure! I feel like the people who had had a
visit from the gods of old."

"And you understand how impossible it would be to run away," I said.

She smiled, but added, "Lucy, my dear, that looked very like a
wedding-ring!"

I could not think it possible. Why, he was scarcely five-and-twenty!
And yet the suggestion haunted me, whenever my eyes fell on his
countenance in repose, and noted the habitual sadness of expression
which certainly did not match with the fine open face that seemed
fitted to express the joy of strength. It came on me too when, at the
lodge, a child who had been left alone too long and had fallen into an
unmitigated agony of screaming, Harry had actually, instead of fleeing
from the sound, gone in, taken the screamer in his arms, and so hushed
and pacified it, that on the mother's return she found it at perfect
rest.

"One would think the gentleman was a father himself, ma'am," she had
said to me; and thereupon Harold had coloured, and turned hastily
aside, so that the woman fancied she had offended him and apologised,
so that he had been forced to look back again and say, "Never mind,"
and "No harm done," with a half laugh, which, as it now struck me, had
a ring of pain in it, and was not merely the laugh of a shy young man
under an impossible imputation. True, I knew he was not a religious
man, but to believe actual ill of him seemed to me impossible.

He had set himself to survey the Arghouse estate, so as to see how
those dying wishes of his father could best be carried out, and he was
making himself thoroughly acquainted with every man, woman, child, and
building, to the intense jealousy of Bullock, who had been agent all
through my mother's time, and had it all his own way. He could not
think why "Mr. Harold" should be always hovering about the farms and
cottages, sometimes using his own ready colonial hand to repair
deficiencies, and sometimes his purse, and making the people take
fancies into their heads that were never there before, and which would
make Mr. Alison lose hundreds a year if they were attended to. And as
Mr. Alison always did attend to his cousin, and gave orders
accordingly, the much-aggrieved Bullock had no choice but in delaying
their execution and demonstrating their impracticability, whereas, of
course, Harold did not believe in impossibilities.

It was quite true, as he had once said, that though he could not bring
about improvements as readily as if he had been l