n the air, covering all the strong,
rich green, and a pleasant damp, earthy smell, and the walks were smooth
and hard, so that the expedition was not arduous.

The girl had been in England more than a year, but there were some
satisfactions she had not got used to yet nor ceased to enjoy, and one
of these was the accessibility, the convenience of the country. Within
the lodge-gates or without them it seemed all alike a park--it was all
so intensely 'property.' The very name of Plash, which was quaint and
old, had not lost its effect upon her, nor had it become indifferent to
her that the place was a dower-house--the little red-walled, ivied
asylum to which old Mrs. Berrington had retired when, on his father's
death, her son came into the estates. Laura Wing thought very ill of the
custom of the expropriation of the widow in the evening of her days,
when honour and abundance should attend her more than ever; but her
condemnation of this wrong forgot itself when so many of the
consequences looked right--barring a little dampness: which was the fate
sooner or later of most of her unfavourable judgments of English
institutions. Iniquities in such a country somehow always made pictures;
and there had been dower-houses in the novels, mainly of fashionable
life, on which her later childhood was fed. The iniquity did not as a
general thing prevent these retreats from being occupied by old ladies
with wonderful reminiscences and rare voices, whose reverses had not
deprived them of a great deal of becoming hereditary lace. In the park,
half-way, suddenly, Laura stopped, with a pain--a moral pang--that
almost took away her breath; she looked at the misty glades and the
dear old beeches (so familiar they were now and loved as much as if she
owned them); they seemed in their unlighted December bareness conscious
of all the trouble, and they made her conscious of all the change. A
year ago she knew nothing, and now she knew almost everything; and the
worst of her knowledge (or at least the worst of the fears she had
raised upon it) had come to her in that beautiful place, where
everything was so full of peace and purity, of the air of happy
submission to immemorial law. The place was the same but her eyes were
different: they had seen such sad, bad things in so short a time. Yes,
the time was short and everything was strange. Laura Wing was too uneasy
even to sigh, and as she walked on she lightened her tread almost as if
she were go