"I wish it could be for ever, Di," she said, as the two girls were inspecting the rustic, dimity-draperied, lavender-and-rose-leaf-perfumed bedchambers. "Who would wish to go back to prim suburban Bayswater after this? Valentine and I could lodge here after our marriage. It is better than Wimbledon. Grand thoughts would come to him with the thunder of the stormy waves; and on calm bright days like this the rippling water would whisper pretty fancies into his ear. Why, to live here would make any one a poet. I think I could write a novel myself, if I lived here long enough." After this they arranged the pretty sitting-room, and placed an easy-chair by the window for Charlotte, an arm-chair opposite this for Mrs. Sheldon, and between the two a little table for the fancy work and books and flowers, and all the small necessities of feminine existence. And then--while Mrs. Sheldon prowled about the rooms, and discovered so many faults and made so many objections as to give evidence of a fine faculty for invention unsuspected in her hitherto--Charlotte and Diana explored the garden and peeped at the farmyard, where the friendly cow still stared over the white gate, just as she had stared when the fly came to a stop, as if she had not yet recovered from the astonishment created in her pastoral mind by that phenomenal circumstance. And then Charlotte was suddenly tired, and there came upon her that strange dizziness which was one of her most frequent symptoms. Diana led her immediately back to the house, and established her comfortably in her easy-chair. "I must be very ill," she said, plaintively; "for even the novelty of this pretty place cannot make me happy long." * * * * * Mr. Sheldon arrived in the evening, bringing with him a supply of that simple medicine which Charlotte took three times a day. He had remembered that there was no dispensing chemist at Harold's Hill, and that it would be necessary to send to St. Leonards for the medicine, and had therefore brought with him a double quantity of the mild tonic. "It was very kind of you to think of it, though I really don't believe the stuff does me any good," said Charlotte. "Nancy Woolper used to get it for me at Bayswater. She made quite a point of fetching it from the chemist's herself." "Indeed!" exclaimed Mr. Sheldon. "Nancy troubled herself about your medicine, did she?" "Yes, papa; and about me altogether. If I were her own daughter she could scarcely have seemed more anxious." The stockbroker made a mental note of this in the memorandum-book of his brain. Mrs. Woolper was officious, was she, and suspicious?--altogether a troublesome sort of person. "I think a few weeks of workhouse fare would be wholesome for that old lady," he said to himself. "There are some people who never know when they are well off."