The Chase was a pleasant house to visit, and its mistress “a delightful person to know:” and she was one of the best matches in England, and might at any moment turn anybody’s second son into an important county gentleman. Can the reader be surprised that on all accounts, and in every section of society, there should be but one opinion about such an important and attractive person as Miss Trelawny of the Chase? CHAPTER II. HER NEIGHBOURS. There were very great people in the county, whom I will not venture to describe here,--a duke, with his duchess, and all the fine things that naturally belong to dukes: and two barons, and Sir Johns without number: for the county was large and important. Miss Trelawny, I believe, had she acted with ordinary prudence, might have had the Marquis, and been Duchess in her day. He was some years younger than she was; but, as everybody said, if _his_ family did not object to that difference of age on the wrong side, why should she? and the young man was fathoms deep in love, and did not get over his disappointment for three months at least; and nothing could have made a finer match than the Trelawny estate with the Duke’s lands. However, I am not qualified to enter upon any discussion of the motives of such sublime personages. The neighbours who specially belonged to Diana, and who were most interested in the episode of her life which it is my business to relate, were the Hunstantons, who lived in the nearest “place” to Trelawny, and were deeply attached to its mistress; and another small and insignificant household, which, except in consequence of its connection with Diana, would scarcely have been of sufficient importance to be mentioned at all. This latter family was composed of two ladies, an aunt and a niece--the one a clergyman’s widow, the other a clergyman’s orphan-child; peevish, humble-minded, weakly little gentlewomen, with nothing remarkable about them except the simple prettiness of the girl, Sophy, who was a soft, smiling golden-haired creature, unobtrusive and gentle as a little bird. Mrs. Norton was disposed to be mysterious about the connection of herself and her niece with Diana, fearing, as she said, to “compromise” a lady in her position; but this connection was of the very simplest kind. Sophy had been at Mrs. Seymour’s school--a piece of extravagance which had cost her kind aunt a great deal more than she could afford--but the girl had been delicate, and sea-air had been prescribed for her, and good little Mrs. Norton was willing to “live anyhow” in order to secure advantages for the child to whom she had performed all a mother’s duties. Diana was one of the women to whom a dependent of some kind is an invariable appendage, gathered to her by sheer attraction of nature: and Sophy Norton took the place of the necessary burden to be carried about on the other’s strong shoulders. The child was delicate, the governess was kind. She nursed her, she