time--he who had been plucked at college--the library windows had been
boarded up to avoid paying the window-tax. And when the 'young
gentlemen' were at home the housemaid, without a single direction to
that effect, was regular in her charge of this room; opened the windows
and lighted fires daily, and dusted the handsomely-bound volumes, which
were really a very fair collection of the standard literature in the
middle of the last century. All the books that had been purchased since
that time were held in small book-cases between each two of the
drawing-room windows, and in Mrs. Hamley's own sitting-room upstairs.
Those in the drawing-room were quite enough to employ Molly; indeed she
was so deep in one of Sir Walter Scott's novels that she jumped as if
she had been shot, when an hour or so after breakfast the squire came
to the gravel-path outside one of the windows, and called to ask her if
she would like to come out of doors and go about the garden and home-
fields with him.

'It must be a little dull for you, my girl, all by yourself, with
nothing but books to look at, in the mornings here; but you see, madam
has a fancy for being quiet in the mornings: she told your father about
it, and so did I, but I felt sorry for you all the same, when I saw you
sitting on the ground all alone in the drawing-room.'

Molly had been in the very middle of the _Bride of Lammermoor_, and
would gladly have stayed in-doors to finish it, but she felt the
squire's kindness all the same. They went in and out of old-fashioned
greenhouses, over trim lawns, the squire unlocked the great walled
kitchen-garden, and went about giving directions to gardeners; and all
the time Molly followed him like a little dog, her mind quite full of
'Ravenswood' and 'Lucy Ashton.' Presently, every place near the house
had been inspected and regulated, and the squire was more at liberty to