But after this it became more impossible still that Lily should tamely stay at home and help her mother. Though "the town" had been disagreeable to her while she was in it, it had a certain charm when recollected in the fields at Overbeck, where she never saw any one. The excitement of a carriage passing now and then, a party of tourists--strangers, perhaps foreigners--or of great people of the county, lords and ladies like those in the story-books: the wild exhilaration of a show or pedlar's van, the errand to a shop where countless desirable things were to be seen at least, if not to be had--all these sweetnesses, once tasted, leave a want, a void, when they have passed away, that nothing else can fill up. Lily felt this, though she did not wish to feel it. The remembrance of the constantly exacted obedience, the unrelaxing rule, and all the crosses of her first "service," were very distasteful to her. Home at a distance had seemed heaven. But, if the flaming sword had been swept aside, and Adam and Eve had found the entrance to Paradise reopen to them after the excitement of the struggle with barren earth, would they have gone back, one wonders? Home was (theoretical) Paradise to Lily; but how gay and how exciting, if not pleasant, looked now the little Purgatory below, which had seemed no better that an Inferno to the girl cribbed and cabined and confined! The very gleam of the light in the shop window, the lamp over the inn door--what a sense of dissipation and gaiety was in them! There was nothing like this on the hills, where the stars were the only lamps, and the tinkling of the beck all the music; whereas on the other hand sometimes an organ-grinder would come into the town, and once there had been a German band! The silence and the loneliness overcame Lily after that taste of the excitements of life. She was sick of her old familiar mountains; and the horizon on the landward side, a horizon which was contracted within the limits of a tree or two and a village steeple--that was the best of all. Then there came sinkings of heart, and fitful ill-temper upon the part of the girl, who did not know what she would be at. But Elizabeth was learning wisdom, and knew. She said, "Lily, my lass, you must not bide here. It's fine to have you, but when I'm dead and gone, what would you do up on the fells? You would have to dig potatoes like me. Service is no heritage, but to have a good trade at your fingers' ends, what a thing that would be! I think I will speak to Miss Prentice on Saturday; that's lively. You could see whatever's going on out of her windows, and folks passing by to the castle; the young squire is at home, and there's balls, and I don't know what. I'm 'most sure you will like that, Lily, my dear."