fond of Marian and Gerald, both for their own sake and their mother's,
and to be with her was to them as like being at home as anything could
be. Agnes was quite wrapped up in her friend, whom she pitied so
heartily, and was to lose so soon. She had known no troubles except
through Marian, she reverenced Marian's griefs, and in her respect for
them was inclined to spoil her not a little. Then, through nothing
against the Lyddells had ever been said to Agnes, she had caught
all Marian's prejudiced dislike to them, and sometimes in lively
exaggeration, sometimes in grave condolence, talked of them "as these
horrid people."

Marian felt every day was precious as it passed, and the time seemed to
her far less than two months, when one day there arrived a letter from
Mrs. Lyddell to announce that the family were about to leave London, and
in the course of a week Mr. Lyddell would come to fetch her and Gerald
to Oakworthy.

The letter was kindly expressed, but this was lost upon Marian in the
pain its purport gave her, and the difficulty of composing an answer.
She chose her smallest sheet of writing-paper with the deepest black
edge, wrote as widely as she could, and used the longest words, but with
all Mrs. Wortley's suggestions, she could not eke out what she had to
say beyond the first page. She would not even send her love to her
cousins, for she said she could have no particular affection for them,
and to express any pleasure in the prospect of seeing so many strangers
would be an actual untruth.

What a week was that which followed! Marian loved her home with that
enthusiasm which especially belongs to the inhabitants of mountainous
districts, and still more acutely did she feel the separation from all