fax at the Manor House, where Lady
Eden was celebrating the birthday of her eldest son. She was seated in
the garden conversing with a young Mrs. Tindal, amidst a group of
mothers besides, whose children were at play on the grass. Mr. Laurence
Fairfax was a man of philosophic benevolence, and when advances were
made to his wife (who had a sense and cleverness beyond anything that
could have been expected in anything so bewilderingly pretty) by ladies
of the rank to which he had raised her, he met them with courtesy, and
she had now two friends in Lady Eden and Mrs. Tindal, whose society she
especially enjoyed, because they all had babies and nearly of an age.
Bessie told her grandfather where and in what company she had found her
little cousins and their mother. The squire was silent, but he was not
affronted. No results, however, came of her information, and she left
Abbotsmead the next morning without any further reference to the family
in Minster Court.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

_SUNDAY MORNING AT BEECHHURST_.

Bessie Fairfax arrived at Fairfield late on Saturday night, and had the
warmest welcome from Lady Latimer. They were only four at dinner. Mr.
Logger and Dora Meadows made up the quartette, and as she was tired with
her journey, and the conversation both at table and in the drawing-room
was literary and political, she was thankful to be dismissed to her room
at an early hour. It was difficult to believe that she was actually
within two miles of home. She could see nothing from her window for the
night-dews, and she woke on Sunday morning to a thick Forest mist; but
by nine o'clock it had cleared, and it was a sumptuous day. She was full
of happy excitement, and proposed to set off betimes and walk to church.
Lady Latimer, in her most complacent humor, bade her do exactly what she
liked: there was Dora to accompany her if she walked, or there was room
in the carriage that would convey herself and Mr. Logger.

The young ladies preferred to walk. Bessie had ridden that road with Mr.
Carnegie many and many a time, but had walked it seldom, for there were
short cuts through the brushwood and heather that she was wont to pursue
in her gypsy excursions with the doctor's boys. But these were not paths
for Sunday. She recollected going along that road with Lady Latimer and
her grandfather sorely against her inclination, and returning by the
same way with her grandfather and Mr. Wiley, when the rector,
admonishing he