“I shall just have time to run into the Rectory before I go!” says Lavinia, an hour later, when their pleasantly sauntering steps have brought them home again. A very slight cloud passes over the young man’s face. “I have never yet known an action of yours which was not prefaced by that run,” he says. “If you were to be told that the last trump was to sound in ten minutes, you would answer, ‘I shall just have time to run into the Rectory first.’” “Perhaps I should!” answers she, aggravatingly, walking off and kissing her hand. It is in compliance with an offer from the younger Darcys to exhibit the newly hatched turkeys, that Lavinia is running counter to her lover’s prejudice. She finds them on the banks of the “Tugela River,” a somewhat duck-muddied ditch which runs under the hedge by the henhouse, and is at once led to the pen where Daphne is feeding the turkey-chicks with a mess in which chopped onion--of which, in its bulb state, she mostly carries a specimen in her pocket as a precautionary measure--predominates. “Clergyman has brought out three more than he did last year,” says the child, triumphantly, looking up from the pipkin in her lap. “Clergyman!” repeats Miss Carew, with a cavilling glance at the large and motherly Brahma hen under the coop. “I thought all your hens were soldiers.” “So they are,” answers Phillida, matter-of-factly. “Clergyman is an Army chaplain.” “Do you perceive that Daphne has become a walking onion?” asks Mrs. Darcy, joining the party, and holding her pocket-handkerchief to her nose. “The smell goes all through the house! It wakes us at night.” She says it with humorous resignation, and they both laugh. The situation between the friends is no longer strained. Susan is _almost_ quite silent; and Lavinia is _almost_ quite confident on the subject upon which they know that they differ so widely. Like a generous opponent, Mrs. Darcy has thrown herself heart and soul into the clothes--not many--and the rearrangements of the house--not many either--which the approaching wedding entails. “There never could be a marriage which made so little change in anybody’s life.” Lavinia has said, in a tone of self-congratulation, “The thing that hath been shall be!” and Susan has answered inoffensively in appearance, “Yes?” But the “Yes” is interrogative, and its monosyllable brings to the girl the flashed realization that what she has said is absolutely false; that though she will _live_ within the same walls, take the same walks, look on the same windmills and oast-houses, yet the change to herself will be enormous, irrevocable, unescapable. But that it will be wholly for the better, she has so nearly convinced herself, that it is with a very stout look and high courage, that she now says-- “Rupert came back last night. I was so thankful. We had so much to talk about.”