"Did you find your scholars as attentive as you expected?"

     "Quite."

     "Do you like your house?"

     "Very much."

     "Have I furnished it nicely?"

     "Very nicely, indeed."

     "And made a good choice of an attendant for you in Alice Wood?"

     "You have indeed. She is teachable and handy." (This then, I thought, is Miss Oliver, the heiress; favoured, it seems, in the gifts of fortune, as well as in those of nature! What happy combination of the planets presided over her birth, I wonder?)

     "I shall come up and help you to teach sometimes," she added. "It will be a change for me to visit you now and then; and I like a change. Mr. Rivers, I have been so gay during my stay at S-. Last night, or rather this morning, I was dancing till two o'clock. The ---th regiment are stationed there since the riots; and the officers are the most agreeable men in the world: they put all our young knife-grinders and scissor merchants to shame."