"I don't like the idea of your going so far, alone among strangers," sighed mother; "but, on the other hand, a change is just what you want." "What a pity Hubert is not here to-night--that horrid _premiere_ at the Lyceum! We must lay the plan before him to-morrow," struck in Rosalind, who, hopeless blue-stocking as she was, consulted her oracle with all the faith of a woman who barely knows how to spell. I went over to my mother and took the stool at her feet which my sister had just vacated. "It's going to be: 'Yes,' mother; I have felt it all along." "My dear, I won't be the one to keep you back. But need you make up your mind so soon?" "Mrs. Grey says that the sooner I can leave the better. They would like me to start in a week or ten days," I answered, suppressing as best I could all signs of the feeling of desolation that came over me at the sound of my own words. "You will have to get clothes," cried Rosalind; "those little mouse-coloured garments of yours will never do for ancestral palaces." "Oh, with some new boots and an ulster--I'm afraid I must have an ulster--I shall be quite set up." "You would pay very well for good dressing," observed Jenny, contemplating me with her air of impartial criticism. "You have a nice figure, and a pretty head, and you know how to walk." "'Praise from Sir Hubert Stanley,'" replied Rosalind with some irony. "My dear Elsie, I have seen it in your eyes--they are highly respectable eyes, by the bye--I have seen it in your eyes from the first moment the letter came, that you meant to go. It is you quiet women who have all the courage, if you will excuse a truism." "Well, yes, perhaps I did feel like going from the first." "And, now that is decided, let me tell you, Elsie, that I perfectly hate the idea of losing you," cried Rosalind with sudden abruptness; then, changing her tone, she went on--"for who knows how or when we shall have you back again? You will descend upon that _palazzo_ resplendent in the new boots and the new ulster; the combined radiance of those two adornments will be too much for some Italian Mr. Rochester who, of course, will be lurking about the damask-hung corridors with their painted ceilings. Jane Eyre will be retained as a fixture, and her native land shall know her no more." "You forget that Jane Eyre would have some voice in the matter. And I have always considered Mr. Rochester the most unpleasant person that ever a woman made herself miserable over," I answered calmly enough, for I was accustomed to these little excursions into the realms of fancy on the part of my sister. "I think there's a little stone, Elsie, where the heart ought to be," and Rosalind, bending forward, poked her finger, with unscientific vagueness, at the left side of my waist. "'Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love,'" I quoted, while there flashed across my mind a vision of Rosalind sobbing helplessly on the floor a month before Hubert proposed to her.