Before a couple of weeks passed over, Kate had contrived to divide her days so regularly, to establish for herself a certain routine of little duties, that the time slipped by--as time ever will do in monotony--unfelt. The season was the autumn, and the wild hills and mountains were gorgeous in all the brilliant colour of the ever varied heaths. In the little clefts and valleys, too, where shelter favoured, foxgloves and purple mallows grew with a rare luxuriance, while on every side was met the arbutus, its crimson berries hanging in festoons over rock and crag. The sudden, unexpected sight of the sea, penetrating by many a fissure, as it were, between the mountains, gave unceasing interest to the wild landscape, and over the pathless moors that she strayed, not a living thing to be seen, was the sense of being the first wayfarer who had ever trod these wastes. As Kate wandered whole days alone, over and over again came the doubt across her, which was it--the brilliant past, with all its splendour and luxury, or the solitary present--was the dream? Surely they could not both be real! Was the bygone a fancy built out of some gorgeous fragments of things read, heard, or imagined, or was this--this actual scene around her--a vision that was to move past, and leave her to awake to all her former splendour? Great as the revulsion was to her former life, it was in nothing greater than in the difference between her uncle’s cold, sad, distant manner, for so after the first meeting had it become, and the ever watchful anxiety, the courteous attention to her slightest wish, of Sir Within. She never ceased canvassing with herself how he had borne her desertion; whether he had sunk under it into a hopeless despondency, or called upon his pride to sustain him above any show of indignation. Reading it as the world must read it, there never was such ingratitude; but then the world could never know the provocation, nor ever know by what personal sacrifice she had avenged the slight passed upon her. “My story,” said she, “can never be told; his, he may tell how it suite him.” At moments, a sort of romantic exaltation and a sense of freedom would make her believe that she had done well to exchange the splendid bondage of the past for the untrammelled liberty of the present; and then, at other times, the terrible contrast would so overcome her, that she would sit and cry as if her heart was breaking. “Would my ‘old Gardy’ pity or exult over me if he saw me now? What would he, who would not suffer me to tread on an uncarpeted step, say if he saw me alone, and poorly clad, clambering up these rugged cliffs to reach some point, where, for an instant, I may forget myself? Surely he would not triumph over my fall!