While her mother spoke so it may be supposed how Lucy trembled--so much that at last Lady Curtis took note of it, and asked in some alarm what was the matter, did she think she had taken cold? did she feel ill? No, Lucy said, hurrying on, she had taken no cold; but she was chilly, she had felt it all the afternoon; and then Lady Curtis hurried her into the warm blaze of the morning room, and to the warm tea, which Sir John came in to share, almost as soon as they got indoors. He thought it was very cold, too, seasonable weather, such as ought, to herald Christmas; then he heard the little budget of news. He was delighted to hear of Annie Bird’s proficiency with the soup, and still more delighted that the lady of the gate, the pretty stranger, was coming on Saturday. The one fact was not much more important than the other in the old man’s eyes. CHAPTER XIII. Nancy went very quickly along the village street; the red brown leaves were dropping from her hands; she had forgotten them; her mind was full of excitement, and her eyes of light and life. If Arthur could have seen her at that moment, he who was just now arriving in England, full of anxious thoughts about her, thinking of her as perhaps in want, certainly in poverty, struggling against adverse fate, he would scarcely have known his wife. Never during all the time he had known her had Nancy looked so brilliantly vigorous, and indeed happy. She was happy in a way, happy in the stir of living that was in her mind, the sense of an emergency that would call forth all her powers, and that potential consciousness of active existence which is sometimes better even than happiness. All her faculties were in vigorous exercise, her mind was busy with plans and thoughts. She had that to encounter which might have made the bravest woman in her circumstances quail; but it only strung her nerves, and made her feel the strength within her tingling to her very finger-points. Rash, impulsive, hot-headed she was, as she had always been, but the jar and twist of unhappy pride, of false position, of conscious ignorance and inferiority, and struggling self-assertion were gone. She went rapidly up the village between the rows of cottages, with their little lamps lighted, and past the glow which Mrs. Rolt’s window threw out into the evening. The Rector and the Doctor were going to dine with Cousin Julia that night, and the table was already laid, and showed its modest grandeur frankly to the gazers outside, who thought it very fine indeed. Mrs. Rolt had asked Nancy to that dinner, and though she had declined to go she cast a glance through the wire blinds at the lighted interior and the laid out table, with a pleasant consciousness that she might have been there had she pleased. And then she went across to the Wren Cottage, where Matilda, more careful than Mrs. Rolt, had drawn down the blinds when she lit the lamp. She was seated as usual at her chemises; but she was not so comfortable as