There was a national school at Langthwaite, where all the ladies went on different days and at different hours, to superintend, some the work, and some the spelling; and there was a Sunday school where everyone fought for a class. It was the cordon bleu of Langthwaite to have a class in the Sunday school. There were a great many dissenting chapels, and a great many missionary meetings. Religious excitement being the principal dissipation at Langthwaite, school feasts, Dorcas meetings, district visitings, missionary sermons, awakening preachings, and prayer meetings, were infinite. The parish clergyman, Mr. Bentley, said that the parish was well-worked; and so it was. It was worked until its mental condition was in such a state of turmoil and unrest that no one knew exactly what to believe. To this society came Rosa Floriani, the widow of an Italian artist-count, certainly, and the semi-papistical latitudinarian, perhaps. Why she came to Langthwaite seemed a mystery to many. But it was in truth no mystery:--she thought it was only right to live among her tenants, and to do her best to the society which gave her her fortune. She was a beautiful woman, about twenty-eight or thirty years of age, with fine blue eyes, and light auburn hair, as soft and shining as silk, braided in two thick wavy masses of imprisoned curls. She was very pale, as if she had lived much in darkened rooms; but her lips were red, and so were her nostrils. She was about the middle size; one of those women with small bones and soft outlines who keep young and supple to the last. She was negligent but coquettish in her dress; with such taste in all her arrangements, that, when she received her visitors in a white muslin dressing-gown and small morning-cap, clinging, like trellis-work against flowers, to the curling hair, she seemed to be far better dressed than the Miss Grandvilles in their silks and satins, and jewellery and lace, and grander than their grand carriage with a footman six feet high. She was excessively indolent in her habits; at least the Langthwaite world said so; never, by any chance, “dressed” at eleven or twelve o’clock, which was the general time for paying morning visits in that part of the world; and always receiving her _monde_, as she called them, upstairs in her dressing-room, in this kind of pretty negligence--very often wearing slippers, not shoes; little slippers of blue, or rose, or brown satin, trimmed round with lace and ribbon, clacking on the ground as she walked, for they had no heels. And indeed it was said that Madame Floriani had been seen in the middle of the day, and even in the evening, in the same undress, which was very near to a crime in Langthwaite. But her abode was worse than her attire. She had fitted up Whitefield House with all her Roman treasures, and they scandalised Langthwaite. The Miss Grandvilles said they were quite shocked, and Mr. Bentley spoke through his nose, and sighed as he called the pretty