that, according to her habits of life and of undergoing fatigue, she was
now amply or even superfluously provided with the means of encountering
the expenses of the road, up and down from London, and all other expenses
whatever.






CHAPTER THIRD

What strange and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a lover's head;
"O mercy!" to myself I cried,
"If Lucy should be dead!"
Wordsworth.

In pursuing her solitary journey, our heroine, soon after passing the
house of Dumbiedikes, gained a little eminence, from which, on looking to
the eastward down a prattling brook, whose meanders were shaded with
straggling widows and alder trees, she could see the cottages of Woodend
and Beersheba, the haunts and habitation of her early life, and could
distinguish the common on which she had so often herded sheep, and the
recesses of the rivulet where she had pulled rushes with Butler, to plait
crowns and sceptres for her sister Effie, then a beautiful but spoiled
child, of about three years old. The recollections which the scene
brought with them were so bitter, that, had she indulged them, she would
have sate down and relieved her heart with tears.