It was morning, and all the usual business was well begun; the cows were out in their pasture on the hillside; the chickens about the close vicinity of the house; nothing was audible except their busy cackle and the hum of the bees, which Elizabeth Murray kept, and which were one of her sources of income--and her own steps coming and going in her house. Before you came in sight of the house you could hear those brisk steps, stately and harmonious, giving a sign of life in the pleasant stillness. Dick was in the potato-field close by; there had been a fine crop, and he was digging them up for the market at Waterside. He was whistling as he worked, but Elizabeth, whose mind was full of many cares, did not sing snatches now of one song, now of another, as was her wont. How seldom it is that the mother of children has not occasion for anxiety about one or another! and it seemed to her that she had so much. Lily; what should she do with Lily if the girl grumbled at the loneliness, as she was likely to do, or pined for her friends, and for the admiration she had called forth? All that would be natural--quite natural. After half consenting to leave her daughter and to trust to her prudence, Elizabeth had been seized with a panic on her return home, and had sent instructions that Lily should return on Monday morning; and now again she was doubtful, as was also so natural, of the wisdom of the step she had taken. How would Lily bear the solitude? Up here among the hills, nothing except the household work and the mild vicissitudes of the chickens and the cows ever happened. Elizabeth herself did not mind, because, as she said to herself, she was old, and all that was likely to happen to her in this world had happened and was done with; and Dick did not mind, for he had not begun yet to think of anything beyond his work, and life was all before him, and he had been accustomed to the tranquillity all his days--but Lily! And on the other hand, there was Abel to think of--the lost boy--who yet was so much greater and happier and better off than ever Elizabeth could have made him. She sighed, but took herself to task for it, declaring to herself with tears in her eyes that she did not grudge his grandeur--that it was for his happiness she cared, not for her happiness through him. "But oh, it cannot come to good that he should think shame of his own folks," she sighed in the depths of her heart. Yet it was so pleasant to think of him as "a gentleman." It seemed to Elizabeth that if she could but see him enjoying that high estate, courted and made much of by the great folks of the land, she would not want to speak to him or betray him. Oh, far from that! She would live in the house with him and never betray him.