"I would give you unlimited credit with Todd, Helen, for all your requirements in that way, but that I fear you would be too conscientious to make sufficient use of it. But stay; the best plan will be to arrange it with Farleigh. Yes; I'll speak to him, and tell Todd he is to give him anything he asks for. I daresay he won't mind a little additional trouble in the cause of his poor people; and you can do the visiting and all that as usual, and report to him." Sir Laurence looked at Helen as he made this remarkably convenient proposition for rendering the intercourse between the Park and the Rectory (for Cuthbert lived at the rector's house; that is to say, in a corner of it) more frequent than it was at present. Helen grew extremely red, and then turned the conversation. "So, I suppose," said she to Mrs. Chisholm, after Sir Laurence had taken his leave, and the two women were talking over his visit and all the late events,--"so I suppose we shall live here until Sir Laurence is married; and then, when he brings a handsome, dashing, fashionable Lady Alsager down here, you and I, dear old woman, will go and live in the village; perhaps that pretty little house with the roses and the little white fountain, just big enough for the two ducks that are always swimming in it, may be vacant then; and I daresay Laurence would give it to us rent-free, and we should be very snug there; but we would not have ducks, except for dinner; and Lady Alsager would have us up to tea, I daresay, when there were no fine people at the Park. What do you say to all this, Mrs. Chisholm? doesn't it sound pleasant? What a cosy little place it is! don't you think so?" "My dear Helen, how you do run on?" said the calmer Mrs. Chisholm; "you are quite in spirits to-day." She was; for in her sketch of the rural abode with the roses there had been an unmentioned element. Helen thought the house would be quite the thing for a curate. Helen was always thinking about a curate; and in that respect there was considerable sympathy between her and her companion, for Mrs. Chisholm was almost always thinking of a curate too. Helen's curate was living; Mrs. Chisholm's was dead. The girl's heart was in a dream of the future; the woman's, in the memory of the sacred past.