rning to Will and
shaking hands with open cheerfulness, while she made no other form of
greeting, but went on answering her uncle. "I am very slow. When I
want to be busy with books, I am often playing truant among my
thoughts. I find it is not so easy to be learned as to plan cottages."

She seated herself beside her uncle opposite to Will, and was evidently
preoccupied with something that made her almost unmindful of him. He
was ridiculously disappointed, as if he had imagined that her coming
had anything to do with him.

"Why, yes, my dear, it was quite your hobby to draw plans. But it was
good to break that off a little. Hobbies are apt to ran away with us,
you know; it doesn't do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.
I have never let myself be run away with; I always pulled up. That is
what I tell Ladislaw. He and I are alike, you know: he likes to go
into everything. We are working at capital punishment. We shall do a
great deal together, Ladislaw and I."

"Yes," said Dorothea, with characteristic directness, "Sir James has
been telling me that he is in hope of seeing a great change made soon
in your management of the estate--that you are thinking of having the
farms valued, and repairs made, and the cottages improved, so that
Tipton may look quite another place. Oh, how happy!"--she went on,
clasping her hands, with a return to that more childlike impetuous
manner, which had been subdued since her marriage. "If I were at home
still, I should take to riding again, that I might go about with you
and see all that! And you are going to engage Mr. Garth, who praised
my cottages, Sir James says."

"Chettam is a little hasty, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, coloring
slightly; "a little hasty, you know. I never said I should do anything
of the kind. I never said I should _not_ do it, you know."

"He only feels confident that you will do it," said Dorothea, in a
voice as clear and unhesitating as that of a young chorister chanting a
credo, "because you mean to enter Parliament as a member who cares for
the improvement of the people, and one of the first things to be made
better is the state of the land and the laborers. Think of Kit Downes,
uncle, who lives with his wife and seven children in a house with one
sitting room and one bedroom hardly larger than this table!--and those
poor Dagleys, in their tumble-down farmhouse, where they live in the
back kitchen and leave the other rooms to the rats!