and I do not live in a world in which
girls are free to follow their own inclinations. I should break Lady
Maulevrier's heart if I were to make a foolish marriage; and I owe her
too much to set her wishes at naught, or to make her declining years
unhappy. I must obey her, at any cost to my own feelings. Please never
mention Mr. Hammond's name. I'm sure I've had quite enough unhappiness
about him.'

'I see,' said Mary, bitterly. 'It is your own pain you think of, not
his. He may suffer, so long as you are not worried.'

'You are an impertinent chit,' retorted Lesbia, 'and you know nothing
about it.'

After this there was no more said about Mr. Hammond; but Mary did not
forget him. She wrote long letters to her brother, who was still in
Scotland, shooting, deer-stalking, fishing, killing something or other
daily, in the most approved fashion of an Englishman taking his
pleasure. Maulevrier occasionally repaid her with a telegram; but he was
not a good correspondent. He declared that life was too short for
letter-writing.

Summer was gone; the lake was no longer a shining emerald floor, dotted
with the reflection of the flock upon the verdant slopes above it, but
dull and grey of hue, and broken by white-edged wavelets. Patches of
snow gleamed on the misty heights of Helvellyn, and the autumn winds
howled and shrieked around Fellside in the evenings, when all the
shutters were shut, and the outside world seemed little more than an
idea: that mystic hour when the sheep are slumbering under the starry
sky, and when, as the Westmoreland peasant believes, the fairies help
the housewife at her spinning-wheel.

Those October evenings were very long and weary for Lesbia and her
sister. Lady Maulevrier read and mused in her low chair beside the fire,
with her books piled upon her own particular table, and lighted by her
own particular lamp. She talked very little, but she was always gracious
to her granddaughters and their governess, and she liked them to be with
her in the evening. Lesbia played or sang, or sat at work at her
basket-table, which occupied the other side of the fireplace; and
Fraeulein and Mary had the rest of the room to themselves, as it were,
those two places by the hearth being sacred, as if dedicated to
household gods. Mary read immensely in those long evenings, devouring
volume after volume, feeding her imagination with every kind of
nutriment, good, bad, and indifferent. Fraeulein Mueller knitted a wo