not want me. If
it rains, you can stay till I call for you. Otherwise, come back when
you like. The first door to your left in the hall."

Miss Dudley met me in the parlor-door, laughing. "I should have come out
to make prize of you," said she, "but they say it is rather bleak this
morning, and I am still under orders. I had almost given you up for this
week; but the Doctor assures me that he has already been suitably dealt
with and brought to repentance, and so there is no more to be said on
that point, especially as you have happened to hit on the very time when
I am most alone, and when, as I have been accustomed to be the busiest,
I feel my present idleness the most. You drove here, after all. You are
not tired? What should you say, first, to a walk with me?"

A staid-looking, exquisitely neat, elderly woman brought her bonnet,
umbrella, gloves, and a large Scotch plaid shawl, in which she wrapped
Miss Dudley, with much solicitude, and was so prettily thanked for her
pains that I longed to have the wrapping up to do myself.

"I really do not think I needed to be muffled up quite so closely
to-day," said my hostess, as she stepped lightly from the piazza to the
sunlit gravel-walk; "but Bonner is ten years older than I, and feels the
cold a good deal herself, and I do not like to make her anxious about
me. She had a great fright, poor thing! when I was ill. Where shall we
go, Miss Morne?--to the garden or the shore? I am not certain that those
clouds mean to give us time for both."

Not knowing which she would prefer, I answered that I could hardly
choose, unless she would be so kind as to tell me which was the most
beautiful. To my joy, she said the shore. The path ran close to the
edge of the cliffs; and below our very feet were the beach and the
breakers. We both forgot ourselves at first, I think, in the sight and
sound.

At length she turned, with a sudden movement, and looked me in the face.
"I do believe, Miss Morne," said she, "that you are one of the fortunate
people who have the power to enjoy this to the full. I trust that we may
often still enjoy it here together."

"Shall I tell you how I enjoy it, ma'am?" I exclaimed, carried out of
myself at sight of the enthusiasm that was tinging her delicate cheek
and lighting up her eyes. "As we enjoy those things that it never comes
into our heads to ask ourselves whether we like or not. Some things we
_have_ to ask ourselves, whether we like or not, before