Heathcote Mountford, however, notwithstanding the dulness and the dismal weather, and all the imperfections of the incomplete household, continued at Mount. The long blanks of country life, nothing happening from the arrival of one post to another, no stir of life about, only the unbroken stillness of the rain or the sunshine, the good or bad weather, the one tempting him out, the other keeping him within, were all novelties, though of the heavy kind, and gave him a kind of amused-spectator consciousness of the tedium, rather than any suffering from it. He was not so easily affected as many people would be by the circumstances of external life, and knowing that he could at any moment go back to his den at the Albany, he took the much deeper seclusion of Mount as a sort of ‘retreat,’ in which he could look out upon the before and after, and if he sometimes ‘pined for what was not,’ yet could do it unenviously and unbitterly, wondering at rather than objecting to the strange misses and blunders of life. Mr. Loseby, who had tutored Anne in her duties, did the same for Heathcote, showing him by what means he could ‘take an interest’ in the dwellers upon his land, so as to be of some use to them. And he rode about the country with the land-agent, and became aware, and became proud as he became aware, of the character of his own possessions, of the old farmhouses, older than Mount itself, and the old cottages, toppling to their ruin, among which were many that Anne had doomed. Wherever he went he heard of what Miss Anne had done, and settled to do. The women in the condemned cottages told him the improvements she had promised, and he, in most cases, readily undertook to carry out these promises, notwithstanding his want of means. ‘They’re doing it at Lilford, where Miss Anne has been and given her orders,’ said the women. ‘I don’t know why there should be differences made. We’re as good every bit as the Lilford folks.’ ‘But you have not got Miss Anne,’ said Heathcote. And then there would be an outburst of lamentations, interrupted by anxious questioning. ‘Why haven’t we got Miss Anne?--is it true as all the money has been left away from her?’ Heathcote had a great many questions of this kind to answer, and soon began to feel that he himself was the supposed culprit to whom the estate had been ‘left away.’ ‘I am supposed to be your supplanter,’ he wrote to Anne herself, ‘and I _feel_ your deputy doing your work for you. Dear Lady of Mount, send me your orders. I will carry them out to the best of my ability. I am poor, and not at all clever about the needs of the estate, but I think, don’t you think? that the great Mr. Bulstrode, who is so good as to be my agent, is something of a bully, and does not by any means do his spiriting gently. What do you think? You are not an ignoramus, like me.’ This letter Anne answered very fully, and it produced a correspondence between them which was a great