en. With all the chances against her of house,
hall, place, park, court, and cottage, Northanger turned up an abbey,
and she was to be its inhabitant. Its long, damp passages, its narrow
cells and ruined chapel, were to be within her daily reach, and she
could not entirely subdue the hope of some traditional legends, some
awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun.

It was wonderful that her friends should seem so little elated by the
possession of such a home, that the consciousness of it should be so
meekly borne. The power of early habit only could account for it. A
distinction to which they had been born gave no pride. Their superiority
of abode was no more to them than their superiority of person.

Many were the inquiries she was eager to make of Miss Tilney; but so
active were her thoughts, that when these inquiries were answered, she
was hardly more assured than before, of Northanger Abbey having been
a richly endowed convent at the time of the Reformation, of its having
fallen into the hands of an ancestor of the Tilneys on its dissolution,
of a large portion of the ancient building still making a part of the
present dwelling although the rest was decayed, or of its standing low
in a valley, sheltered from the north and east by rising woods of oak.

CHAPTER 18

With a mind thus full of happiness, Catherine was hardly aware that two
or three days had passed away, without her seeing Isabella for more than
a few minutes together. She began first to be sensible of this, and
to sigh for her conversation, as she walked along the pump-room one
morning, by Mrs. Allen's side, without anything to say or to hear; and
scarcely had she felt a five minutes' longing of friendship, before the
object of it appeared, and inviting her to a secret conference, led the
way to a seat. "This is my favourite place," said she as they sat
down on a bench between the doors, which commanded a tolerable view of
everybody entering at either; "it is so out of the way."

Catherine, observing that Isabella's eyes were continually bent towards
one door or the other, as in eager expectation, and remembering how
often she had been falsely accused of being arch, thought the present a
fine opportunity for being really so; and therefore gaily said, "Do not
be uneasy, Isabella, James will soon be here."

"Psha! My dear creature," she replied, "do not think me such a simpleton
as to be always wanting to confine him to my elbow. It woul