e Helstone,
and make her take some exercise. She shall have a breezy walk over
Nunnely Common."

"If you go in that direction, my dear, have the goodness to remind Miss
Helstone to wrap up well, as there is a fresh wind, and she appears to
me to require care."

"You shall be minutely obeyed, Mrs. Pryor. Meantime, will you not
accompany us yourself?"

"No, my love; I should be a restraint upon you. I am stout, and cannot
walk so quickly as you would wish to do."

Shirley easily persuaded Caroline to go with her, and when they were
fairly out on the quiet road, traversing the extensive and solitary
sweep of Nunnely Common, she as easily drew her into conversation. The
first feelings of diffidence overcome, Caroline soon felt glad to talk
with Miss Keeldar. The very first interchange of slight observations
sufficed to give each an idea of what the other was. Shirley said she
liked the green sweep of the common turf, and, better still, the heath
on its ridges, for the heath reminded her of moors. She had seen moors
when she was travelling on the borders near Scotland. She remembered
particularly a district traversed one long afternoon, on a sultry but
sunless day in summer. They journeyed from noon till sunset, over what
seemed a boundless waste of deep heath, and nothing had they seen but
wild sheep, nothing heard but the cries of wild birds.

"I know how the heath would look on such a day," said Caroline;
"purple-black--a deeper shade of the sky-tint, and that would be livid."

"Yes, quite livid, with brassy edges to the clouds, and here and there a
white gleam, more ghastly than the lurid tinge, which, as you looked at
it, you momentarily expected would kindle into blinding lightning."

"Did it thunder?"

"It muttered distant peals, but the storm did not break till evening,
after we had reached our inn--that inn being an isolated house at the
foot of a range of mountains."

"Did you watch the clouds come down over the mountains?"

"I did. I stood at the window an hour watching them. The hills seemed
rolled in a sullen mist, and when the rain fell in whitening sheets,
suddenly they were blotted from the prospect; they were washed from the
world."

"I have seen such storms in hilly districts in Yorkshire; and at their
riotous climax, while the sky was all cataract, the earth all flood, I
have remembered the Deluge."

"It is singularly reviving after such hurricanes to feel calm return,
and from the opening