rooms, making everything warm and pretty. Out of her own pocket she
had bought a shot-belt for one, and skates for the other. She had
told the old groom that her pony was to belong exclusively to Master
Harry for the holidays, and now Harry told her that still waters ran
deep. She had been driven to the use of all her eloquence in
inducing her father to purchase that gun for Frank, and now Frank
called her a Puritan. And why? She did not choose that a mistletoe
bough should be hung in her father's hall, when Godfrey Holmes was
coming to visit him. She could not explain this to Frank, but Frank
might have had the wit to understand it. But Frank was thinking
only of Patty Coverdale, a blue-eyed little romp of sixteen, who,
with her sister Kate, was coming from Penrith to spend the Christmas
at Thwaite Hall. Elizabeth left the room with her slow, graceful
step, hiding her tears,--hiding all emotion, as latterly she had
taught herself that it was feminine to do. "There goes my lady
Fineairs," said Harry, sending his shrill voice after her.

Thwaite Hall was not a place of much pretension. It was a moderate-
sized house, surrounded by pretty gardens and shrubberies, close
down upon the river Eamont, on the Westmoreland side of the river,
looking over to a lovely wooded bank in Cumberland. All the world
knows that the Eamont runs out of Ulleswater, dividing the two
counties, passing under Penrith Bridge and by the old ruins of
Brougham Castle, below which it joins the Eden. Thwaite Hall
nestled down close upon the clear rocky stream about half way
between Ulleswater and Penrith, and had been built just at a bend of
the river. The windows of the dining-parlour and of the drawing-
room stood at right angles to each other, and yet each commanded a
reach of the stream. Immediately from a side of the house steps
were cut down through the red rock to the water's edge, and here a