rejoiced in the
ancient liberty she had regained of going out and coming back when she
pleased; and as the weather was too cold ever to tempt Simon from his
fireside, except, perhaps, for half-an-hour in the forenoon, so the
hours of dusk, when he least missed her, were those which she chiefly
appropriated for stealing away to the good school-mistress, and growing
wiser and wiser every day in the ways of God and the learning of His
creatures. The schoolmistress was not a brilliant woman. Nor was it
accomplishments of which Fanny stood in need, so much as the opening
of her thoughts and mind by profitable books and rational conversation.
Beautiful as were all her natural feelings, the schoolmistress had now
little difficulty in educating feelings up to the dignity of principles.

At last, hitherto patient under the absence of one never absent from her
heart, Fanny received from him the letter he had addressed to her
two days before he quitted Beaufort Court;--another letter--a second
letter--a letter to excuse himself for not coming before--a letter
that gave her an address that asked for a reply. It was a morning of
unequalled delight approaching to transport. And then the excitement of
answering the letter--the pride of showing how she was improved, what an
excellent hand she now wrote! She shut herself up in her room: she
did not go out that day. She placed the paper before her, and, to her
astonishment, all that she had to say vanished from her mind at once.
How was she even to begin? She had always hitherto called him "Brother."
Ever since her conversation with Sarah she felt that she could not call
him that name again for the world--no, never! But what should she call
him--what could she call him? He signed himself "Philip." She knew that
was his name. She thought it a musical name to utter, but to write it!
No! some instinct she could not account for seemed to whisper that
it was improper--presumptuous, to call him "Dear Philip." Had Burns's
songs--the songs that unthinkingly he had put into her hand, and told
her to read--songs that comprise the most beautiful love-poems in the
world--had they helped to teach her some of the secrets of her own
heart? And had timidity come with knowledge? Who shall say--who guess
what passed within her? Nor did Fanny herself, perhaps, know her own
feelings: but write the words "Dear Philip" she could not. And the whole
of that day, though she thought of nothing else, she could not