eave the house quiet."

And quiet it was in another hour--Gertrude walking with the nurses, Dr.
May gone to his patients, and all the rest at Abbotstoke, except Richard
and Margaret downstairs; and Ethel, who, while arranging her properties
in her new room, had full leisure to lay out before herself the duties
that had devolved on her and to grapple with them. She recalled the
many counsels that she had received from Flora, and they sounded so
bewildering that she wished it had been Conic sections, and then she
looked at a Hebrew grammar that Norman had given her, and gave a sigh as
she slipped it into the shelf of the seldom used. She looked about the
room, cleared out the last piece of brown paper, and burned the last
torn envelope, that no relic of packing and change might distress
Margaret's eyes for order; then feeling at once desolate and intrusive,
she sat down in Flora's fireside chair, opened her desk, and took out
her last time-table. She looked at it for some minutes, laid it aside,
and rising, knelt down. Again seating herself, she resumed her paper,
took a blank one, ruled it, and wrote her rules for each hour of each
day in the week. That first hour after breakfast, when hitherto she had
been free, was one sacrifice; it must go now, to ordering dinner,
seeing after stores, watching over the children's clothes, and the
other nondescripts, which, happily for her, Flora had already reduced to
method. The other loss was the spare time between the walk and tea; she
must not spend that in her own room now, or there would be no one to sit
with Margaret, or keep the little ones from being troublesome to her.
Ethel had often had to give up this space before, when Flora went out in
the evening, and she had seldom felt otherwise than annoyed. Give it
up for good! that was the cure for temper, but it had been valuable as
something of her own. She would have been thankful could she have
hoped to keep regularly to her own rules, but that she knew was utterly
improbable--boys, holidays, callers, engagements, Dr. May, would all
conspire to turn half her days upside down, and Cocksmoor itself must
often depend not only on the weather, but on home doings. Two or three
notes she wrote at the foot of her paper.

'N. B. These are a standard--not a bed of Procrustes.
MUSTS--To be first consulted.--Mays--last. Ethel May's
last of all.
If I cannot do everything--omit the self-chosen.
MEM-- Neith