ether he rode or walked, whether he only crossed his
counting-house hearth or galloped over sullen Rushedge, he was aware of
a hollow echo, and felt the ground shake to his tread.

While the summer thus passed with Moore, how did it lapse with Shirley
and Caroline? Let us first visit the heiress. How does she look? Like a
love-lorn maiden, pale and pining for a neglectful swain? Does she sit
the day long bent over some sedentary task? Has she for ever a book in
her hand, or sewing on her knee, and eyes only for that, and words for
nothing, and thoughts unspoken?

By no means. Shirley is all right. If her wistful cast of physiognomy is
not gone, no more is her careless smile. She keeps her dark old
manor-house light and bright with her cheery presence. The gallery and
the low-ceiled chambers that open into it have learned lively echoes
from her voice; the dim entrance-hall, with its one window, has grown
pleasantly accustomed to the frequent rustle of a silk dress, as its
wearer sweeps across from room to room, now carrying flowers to the
barbarous peach-bloom salon, now entering the dining-room to open its
casements and let in the scent of mignonette and sweet-briar, anon
bringing plants from the staircase window to place in the sun at the
open porch door.

She takes her sewing occasionally; but, by some fatality, she is doomed
never to sit steadily at it for above five minutes at a time. Her
thimble is scarcely fitted on, her needle scarce threaded, when a sudden
thought calls her upstairs. Perhaps she goes to seek some
just-then-remembered old ivory-backed needle-book or older china-topped
work-box, quite unneeded, but which seems at the moment indispensable;
perhaps to arrange her hair, or a drawer which she recollects to have
seen that morning in a state of curious confusion; perhaps only to take
a peep from a particular window at a particular view, whence Briarfield
church and rectory are visible, pleasantly bowered in trees. She has
scarcely returned, and again taken up the slip of cambric or square of
half-wrought canvas, when Tartar's bold scrape and strangled whistle are
heard at the porch door, and she must run to open it for him. It is a
hot day; he comes in panting; she must convoy him to the kitchen, and
see with her own eyes that his water-bowl is replenished. Through the
open kitchen door the court is visible, all sunny and gay, and people
with turkeys and their poults, peahens and their chicks, pearl-f