"Yes," said Eugenia, thoughtfully, "they are; and it is you I have to thank for their being so, Roma." "No, don't say that," interrupted Roma, quickly. "I don't like you to say so, because I want you to do Beauchamp justice. There is more to work upon in him than you were inclined to think, and you, as I told you before, have more power over him to draw out his best than any one else ever had or could have." "But still it is your doing," persisted Eugenia, affectionately; "for who else but you could ever have opened my eyes to see this, or at least to look for it?" A new feeling had wakened in her heart to her husband. From the ashes of the old unreasoning, wilfully blind, headstrong devotion had arisen a calmer, more tempered, more enduring sentiment. As yet she was hardly conscious of its existence; its component parts she could certainly not have defined. She only said to herself, "I don't know how it is, but, somehow, what has passed to-day has made me feel _sorry_ for Beauchamp. I don't think hitherto any one has taken much pains to draw out what Roma calls `his best.' And I am so weak and foolish and full of faults, how can I hope to do it? Yet, somehow, I think I _do_ hope it." They all left Nunswell the next day, Roma travelling with them as far as Wareborough only, where she had promised a short visit to her cousins, the Dalrymples; Beauchamp and his wife returning to Halswood, there at once to commence preparations for their visit to foreign parts. Eugenia trembled a little as they drew near the spot which, but so few days before, she had quitted with something very like despair in her heart. There was a mingling of almost superstitious apprehensiveness in her shrinking from "beginning again"--with new motives, new hopes, new patience--in the very place which had witnessed the woeful failure of her first essays, the cloudy ending to the too brilliant promise of the dawn of her married life. But these half-morbid feelings she was wise enough to keep to herself. "I only hope," she thought, "that Mrs Grier will not think herself bound to receive me in state after so short an absence. If she does I shall take it as a bad omen. She is a very good creature, but I shall never forget her first reception." So it was with some little apprehension that Mrs Chancellor looked out of the carriage as the front of the house came in sight. She knew Mrs Eyrecourt had gone; it had never occurred to her that poor little Floss had been temporarily left behind. Her surprise was great, her relief and pleasure extreme, when, almost before the carriage had stopped, she heard her own name shouted in the little girl's peculiar pronunciation: "Aunty 'Genia, Aunty 'Genia, you have comed back! Kiss me quick! You never said good-bye when you wented away, and I cwied so! Please don't never go away any more!"