‘I hope you have had a pleasant morning,’ she said. She did not avoid Cosmo, but gave him her hand as simply as to the rest. She addressed him little, but still did not hesitate to address him, and once the Rector perceived her looking at him unawares with eyes full of the deepest compassion. Why was she so pitiful? Cosmo did not seem to like the look. He was wistful and anxious. Already there was something, a warning of evil, in the air. CHAPTER XXXI. FALLEN FROM HER HIGH ESTATE. The ‘Black Bull’ at Hunston is one of those old inns which have been superseded, wherever it is practicable, by new ones, and which are in consequence eagerly resorted to by enlightened persons, wherever they are to be found; but there was nobody in Hunston, beyond the ordinary little countrytown visitors, to appreciate its comfortable old rooms, old furniture, and old ways. When there was a county ball, the county people who had daughters engaged rooms in it occasionally, and the officers coming from Scarlett-town filled up all the corners. But county balls were rare occurrences, and there had not been yet under the _régime_ of old Saymore a single instance of exceptional gaiety or fulness. So that, though it was highly respectable, and the position of landlord one of ease and dignity, the profits had been as yet limited. Saymore himself, however, in the spotless perfection of costume which he had so long kept up at Mount, and with his turn for artistic arrangements, and general humble following of the ‘fads’ of his young ladies, was in himself a model of a master for a Queen Anne house (though not in the least what the prototype of that character would have been), and was in a fair way to make his house everything which a house of that period ought to be. And though Keziah, in the most fashionable of nineteenth-century dresses, was a decided anachronism, yet her little face was pleasant to the travellers arriving hot and dusty on an August evening, and finding in those two well-known figures a something of home which went to their hearts. To see Saymore at the carriage door made Mrs. Mountford put her handkerchief to her eyes, a practice which she had given up for at least six months past. And, to compare small things with great, when Keziah showed them to their rooms, notwithstanding the pride of proprietorship with which she led the way, the sight of Anne and Rose had a still greater effect upon little Mrs. Saymore; Rose especially, in her Paris dress, with a waist like nothing at all--whereas to see Keziah, such a figure! She cried, then dried her tears, and recollected the proud advances in experience and dignity she had made, and her responsibilities as head of a house, and all her plate and linen, and her hopes: so much had she gone through, while with them everything was just the same: thus pride on one side in her own second chapter of life, and envy on the other of the freedom of their untouched lives produced a great commotion in her. ‘Mr.