the open-air tea drinkers had adjourned to dance country dances, by
civic permission, and in perfectly respectable jollity.

"I wonder," said Hilary--while, despite some natural regret, her
spirit stretched itself out eagerly from the narrowness of the place
where she was born into the great wide world; the world where so many
grand things were thought and written and done; the world Robert Lyon
had so long fought with, and was fighting bravely still--"I wonder,
Elizabeth, what sort of place London is, and what our life will be in
it?"

Elizabeth said nothing. For the moment her face seemed to catch the
reflected glow of her mistress's, and then it settled down into that
look of mingled resistance and resolution which was habitual to her.
For the life that was to be, which neither knew--oh, if they had
known!--she also was prepared.



CHAPTER IX.

The day of the Grand Hegira came.

"I remember," said Miss Leaf, as they rumbled for the last time
through the empty morning streets of poor old Stowbury: "I remember
my grandmother telling me that when my grandfather was courting her,
and she out of coquetry refused him, he set off on horseback to
London, and she was so wretched to think of all the dangers he ran on
the journey, and in London itself, that she never rested till she got
him back, and then immediately married him."