‘My doing from beginning to end,’ she cried with a triumph beyond words. ‘William has had _nothing_ to do with it. Robert has had scarcely as much. And to think how little I dreamt of it when I began! Well, to be sure, no one could have _planned_ marrying those two. There’s no one but Providence could have foreseen it-they’re so different. And after all it’s _done_. Now then, whom shall I have next year?’ BOOK II. SURREY. CHAPTER XI. Farewell to the mountains! The scene in which the next act of this unpretending history is to run its course is of a very different kind. In place of the rugged northern nature--a nature wild and solitary indeed, but still rich, luxuriant, and friendly to the senses of the traveller, even in its loneliest places. The heaths and woods of some districts of Surrey are scarcely more thickly peopled than the fells of Westmoreland; the walker may wander for miles, and still enjoy an untamed primitive earth, guiltless of boundary or furrow, the undisturbed home of all that grows and flies, where the rabbits, the lizards, and the birds live their life as they please, either ignorant of intruding man or strangely little incommoded by his neighborhood. And yet there is nothing forbidding or austere in these wide solitudes. The patches of graceful birch-wood; the miniature lakes nestling among them; the brakes of ling--pink, faintly scented, a feast for every sense; the stretches of purple heather, glowing into scarlet under the touch of the sun; the scattered farmhouses, so mellow in color, so pleasant in outline; the general softness and lavishness of the earth and all it bears, make these Surrey commons not a wilderness but a paradise. Nature, indeed, here is like some spoilt, petulant child. She will bring forth nothing, or almost nothing, for man’s grosser needs. Ask her to bear corn or pasture flocks and she will be miserly and grudging. But ask her only to be beautiful, enticing, capriciously lovely, and she will throw herself into the task with all the abandonment, all the energy, that heart could wish.