s life easily. Is not that fact written in her eye? In her
good-tempered moments is it not as full of lazy softness as in her brief
fits of anger it is fulgent with quick-flashing fire? Her nature is in
her eye. So long as she is calm, indolence, indulgence, humour, and
tenderness possess that large gray sphere; incense her, a red ray
pierces the dew, it quickens instantly to flame.

Ere the month of July was past, Miss Keeldar would probably have started
with Caroline on that northern tour they had planned; but just at that
epoch an invasion befell Fieldhead. A genteel foraging party besieged
Shirley in her castle, and compelled her to surrender at discretion. An
uncle, an aunt, and two cousins from the south--a Mr., Mrs., and two
Misses Sympson, of Sympson Grove, ----shire--came down upon her in
state. The laws of hospitality obliged her to give in, which she did
with a facility which somewhat surprised Caroline, who knew her to be
prompt in action and fertile in expedient where a victory was to be
gained for her will. Miss Helstone even asked her how it was she
submitted so readily. She answered, old feelings had their power; she
had passed two years of her early youth at Sympson Grove.

"How did she like her relatives?"

She had nothing in common with them, she replied. Little Harry Sympson,
indeed, the sole son of the family, was very unlike his sisters, and of
him she had formerly been fond; but he was not coming to Yorkshire--at
least not yet.

The next Sunday the Fieldhead pew in Briarfield Church appeared peopled
with a prim, trim, fidgety, elderly gentleman, who shifted his
spectacles, and changed his position every three minutes; a patient,
placid-looking elderly lady in brown satin; and two pattern young
ladies, in pattern attire, with pattern deportment. Shirley had the air
of a black swan or a white crow in the midst of this party, and very
forlorn was her aspect. Having brought her into respectable society, we
will leave her there a while, and look after Miss Helstone.

Separated from Miss Keeldar for the present, as she could not seek her
in the midst of her fine relatives, scared away from Fieldhead by the
visiting commotion which the new arrivals occasioned in the
neighbourhood, Caroline was limited once more to the gray rectory, the
solitary morning walk in remote by-paths, the long, lonely afternoon
sitting in a quiet parlour which the sun forsook at noon, or in the
garden alcove where it shone