warning,' said Rose, as she bade him good-night, 'that
I don't know how to behave to a brother. And I am equally sure that Mrs.
Thornburgh doesn't know how to behave to _fiance_.'

Robert threw up his hands in mock terror at the name and departed.

'We are abandoned,' cried Rose, flitting herself into the chair
again--then with a little flash of half irresolute wickedness--'and we
are free! Oh, I hope she will be happy!'

And she caught Agnes wildly round the neck as though she would drown her
first words in her last.

'Madcap!' cried Agnes struggling. 'Leave me at least a little breath to
wish Catherine joy!'

And they both fled up-stairs.

There was indeed no prouder woman in the three kingdoms than Mrs.
Thornburgh that night. After all the agitation down-stairs she could
not persuade herself to go to bed. She first knocked up Sarah and
communicated the news; then she sat down before a pier-glass in her own
room studying the person who had found Catherine Leyburn a husband.

'My doing from beginning to end,' she cried with a triumph beyond words.
'William has had _nothing_ to do with it. Robert has had scarcely as
much. And to think how little I dreamt of it when I began! Well, to be
sure, no one could have _planned_ marrying those two. There's no one but
Providence could have foreseen it-they're so different. And after all
it's _done_. Now then, whom shall I have next year?'

BOOK II. SURREY.

CHAPTER XI.

Farewell to the mountains!

The scene in which the next act of this unpretending history is to run
its course is of a very different kind. In place of the rugged northern
nature--a nature wild and solitary indeed, but still rich, luxuriant,
and friendly to the senses of the traveller, even in its loneliest
places. The heaths and woods of some districts of Surrey are scarcely
more thickly peopled than the fells of Westmoreland; the walker may
wander for miles, and still enjoy an untamed primitive earth, guiltless
of boundary or furrow, the undisturbed home of all that grows and flies,
where the rabbits, the lizards, and the birds live their life as they
please, either ignorant of intruding man or strangely little incommoded
by his neighborhood. And yet there is nothing forbidding or austere in
these wide solitudes. The patches of graceful birch-wood; the miniature
lakes nestling among them; the brakes of ling--pink, faintly scented,
a feast for every sense; the stretches of purple heather, g