at once.

"Will you not tell me first what is troubling you, Letty?" said Mary.

"No, dear, not now," replied Letty, caring a good deal less about the
right ordering of her way than when she entered the house. Why should
she care, she said to herself--but it was her anger speaking in
her--how she behaved, when she was treated so abominably?

"Then I will come and see you on Sunday," said Mary; "and then we shall
manage to have our talk."

They kissed and parted--Letty unaware that she had given her friend a
less warm kiss than usual. There can hardly be a plainer proof of the
lowness of our nature, until we have laid hold of the higher nature
that belongs to us by birthright, than this, that even a just anger
tends to make us unjust and unkind: Letty was angry with every person
and thing at Thornwick, and unkind to her best friend, for whose sake
in part she was angry. With glowing cheeks, tear-filled eyes, and
indignant heart she set out on her walk home.

It was a still evening, with a great cloud rising in the southwest;
from which, as the sun drew near the horizon, a thin veil stretched
over the sky between, and a few drops came scattering. This was in
harmony with Letty's mood. Her soul was clouded, and her heaven was
only a place for the rain to fall from. Annoyance, doubt, her new sense
of constraint, and a wide-reaching, undefined feeling of homelessness,
all wrought together to make her mind a chaos out of which misshapen
things might rise, instead of an ordered world in which gracious and
reasonable shapes appear. For as the place such will be the thoughts
that spring there; when all in us is peace divine, then, and not till
then, shall we think the absolutely reasonable. Alas, that by our
thoughtlessness or unkindness we should so often be the cause of
monster-births, and those even in the minds of the loved! that we
should be, if but for a moment, the demons that deform a fair world
that loves us! Such was Mrs. Wardour, with her worldly wisdom, that day
to Letty.

About half-way to Thornwick, the path crossed a little heathy common;
and just as Letty left the hedge-guarded field-side, and through a gate
stepped, as it were, afresh out of doors on the open common, the wind
came with a burst, and brought the rain in earnest. It was not yet very
heavy, but heavy enough, with the wind at its back, and she with no
defense but her parasol, to wet her thoroughly before she could reach
any shelter, the neare