"You will permit to say, with the respect which I feel, that we sympathise fully in the distress of mind which you must be experiencing. If you should find comfort in doing us manful justice, we shall congratulate you yet more than ourselves: if not, we shall grieve for you only the more deeply. "My wife joins me in what I have said, and in kindly regards. "Yours sincerely, "Edward Hope." Edward had left his seal with Hester. She sealed the letter, rang for Charles, and charged him to deliver it into Mr Rowland's own hands, placed the copy in her bosom to show to Margaret, and returned to the parlour. Mrs Grey, who was alone with Hope, stopped short in what she was saying. "Go on," said Hope. "We have no secrets here, and no fears of being frightened--for one another any more than for ourselves. Mrs Grey was saying, my dear, that Mr Walcot is very popular here already; and that everybody is going to church to see him." Mrs Grey had half-a-dozen faults or oddities of Mr Walcot's to tell of already; but she was quietly checked in the middle of her list by Mr Hope, who observed that he was bound to exercise the same justice towards Mr Walcot that he hoped to receive from him--to listen to no evil of him which could not be substantiated: and it was certainly too early yet for anything to be known about him by strangers, beyond what he looked like. "To go no deeper than his looks, then," continued Mrs Grey, "nobody can pretend to admire them. He is extremely short. Have you heard how short he is?" "Yes; that inspired me with some respect for him, to begin with. I have heard so much of my being too tall, all my life, that I am apt to feel a profound veneration for men who have made the furthest escape from that evil. By the way, my dear, I should not wonder if Enderby is disposed in Walcot's favour by this, for he is even taller than I." "I am surprised that you can joke on such a subject, Mr Hope. I assure you, you are not the only sufferers by this extraordinary circumstance of Mr Walcot's arrival. It is very hard upon us, that we are to have him for an opposite neighbour--in Mrs Enderby's house, you know. Sophia and I have been in the habit of observing that house, for the old lady's sake, many times in a day. We scarcely ever looked out, but we saw her cap over the blind, or some one or another was at the door, about one little affair or another. It has been a great blank since she was removed--the shutters shut, and the bills up, and nobody going and coming. But now we can never look that way." "I am afraid you will have to get Paxton to put up a weathercock for you on his barn, so that you may look in the opposite direction for the wind." "Nay, Edward, it is really an evil," said Hester, "to have an unwelcome stranger settled in an opposite house, where an old friend has long lived. I can sympathise with Mrs Grey."