olliter was
laughin', with his pipe in his hand.'

'I wish I had not seen him, Milly. I feel as if it were an ill omen. He
always looks so cross; and I dare say he wished us some ill,' I said.

'No, no, you don't know Dudley: if he were angry, he'd say nothing that's
funny; no, he's not vexed, only shamming vexed.'

The scenery through which we passed was very pretty. The road brought us
through a narrow and wooded glen. Such studies of ivied rocks and twisted
roots! A little stream tinkled lonely through the hollow. Poor Milly! In
her odd way she made herself companionable. I have sometimes fancied an
enjoyment of natural scenery not so much a faculty as an acquirement. It is
so exquisite in the instructed, so strangely absent in uneducated humanity.
But certainly with Milly it was inborn and hearty; and so she could enter
into my raptures, and requite them.

Then over one of those beautiful Derbyshire moors we drove, and so into
a wide wooded hollow, where was our first view of Cousin Monica's pretty
gabled house, beautified with that indescribable air of shelter and comfort
which belongs to an old English residence, with old timber grouped round
it, and something in its aspect of the quaint old times and bygone
merrymakings, saying sadly, but genially, 'Come in: I bid you welcome.
For two hundred years, or more, have I been the home of this beloved old
family, whose generations I have seen in the cradle and in the coffin, and
whose mirth and sorrows and hospitalities I remember. All their friends,
like you, were welcome; and you, like them, will here enjoy the warm
illusions that cheat the sad conditions of mortality; and like them you
will go your way, and others succeed you, till at last I, too, shall yield
to the general law of decay, and disappear.'

By this time poor Milly had grown very nervous; a state which she described
in such very odd phraseology as threw me, in spite of myself--for I
affected an impressive gravity in lecturing her upon her language--into a
hearty fit of laughter.

I must mention, however, that in certain important points Milly was very
essentially reformed. Her dress, though not very fashionable, was no longer
absurd. And I had drilled her into speaking and laughing quietly; and
for the rest I trusted to the indulgence which is always, I think, more
honestly and easily obtained from well-bred than from under-bred people.

Cousin Monica was out when we arrived; but we found that she