sed
numerous interests that she inevitably lacked. She was a stranger
amongst the villagers--neither old nor young knew her. There was little
suffering to engage her sympathy or poverty to invite her help. At
Kirkham there were no long-accumulated neglects to reform as there was
at Morte, and to Morte Mr. Fairfax forbade her to go. She had a liberal
allowance, and not half ways enough to spend it, so she doubled her
allowance to Miss Hague on behalf of her former pupils, Geoffry and
Frederick; Laurence paid his own.

She was not a girl of many wants, and her taste did not incline to idle
expenditure. She had seen thrift and the need of thrift in her early
home, and thought money much too valuable to be wasted in buying things
she did not require. Where she saw a necessity she was the freest of
givers, but she had experience, gained in her rides with Mr. Carnegie,
against manufacturing objects of sentimental charity.

Her resource for a little while was the study of the house and
neighborhood she lived in. There was a good deal of history connected
with Kirkham. But it was all contained in the county gazetteer; and when
Macky had instructed her in the romance of the family, and the legends
attached to the ruins by the river and the older portions of the
mansion, all was learnt that there was to know, and the sum of her
reflections announced aloud was, that Abbotsmead was a very big house
for a small family. Macky shook her head in melancholy acquiescence.

The December days were very long, and the weather wild and stormy both
by land and sea. Bessie conjectured sometimes when her uncle Frederick
would come home, but it appeared presently that he was not coming. He
wrote that he had laid up the Foam in one of the Danish ports to be
ready for the breaking up of the winter and a further exploration of the
Baltic coasts, and that he was just starting on a journey into
Russia--judging that the beauty of the North is in perfection during the
season of ice and snow.

"Just like one of Fred's whims!" said his father discontentedly. "As if
he could not have come into Woldshire and have enjoyed the hunting!
Nobody enjoyed it more than he did formerly."

He did not come, however, and Bessie was not astonished. Under other
circumstances Abbotsmead might have been a cheerful house, but it seemed
as if no one cared to make it cheerful now: if the days got over
tranquilly, that was enough. The squire and his granddaughter dined
a