“Did I? Well, so she is; and if I were half as good-looking a fellow as Atty, I should look out for a girl a quarter as nice, with an eighth part of Sophy’s expectations; and if she accepted me, I should think myself a deuced lucky dog. Heigh ho! What an age it seems before the examination time! I wonder how long my mother thinks one can endure such a horrible existence as this.” “It can’t last for ever,” Kate said; “and it is quite as bad for us as it is for you; and yet you never hear either Rhoda or me lamenting over our fate as you do over yours.” “O, girls are different! Women are meant to live in the country, and stay at home.” It was not the first time that Katherine Vavasour had listened to the enunciation of this popular aphorism, and, as usual, it provoked her excessively. In her opinion, the “lines” that had fallen to Horace were very pleasant compared to those hard ones which had been meted out to herself and her sister. He was permitted a certain kind of liberty, had a horse to ride, and provided that the hours for meals were not infringed on, or the family-prayer bell neglected, he was allowed to go and come pretty much as he liked. As regarded her daughters, however, Lady Millicent’s family rules and arrangements were far more strict. Since the simultaneous dismissal (for the flagrant offence of joint matrimonial attentions) of Mr. Collins and Kate’s steady middle-aged governess, Lady Millicent had deemed it her duty to still further circumscribe the narrow circle of her daughters’ pleasures. She was a woman who disliked trouble, so that a few “general orders,” such as that _no_ books from the circulating library were to be read, and no walks outside the park walls were to be taken, formed the staple of her very stringent form of government. Against these retrenchments, as well as against the daily dulness of their monotonous existence, Kate Vavasour (Rhoda was made of more submissive stuff) was perpetually chafing. She dreaded the moment, too, when Horace would be emancipated from the yoke which so sorely galled her own youthful shoulders. His education had been principally a home one, a private tutor having for the last three years been busily employed at the Castle in preparing the younger sons for the ordeal of a civil-service examination. Horace had been very impatient of the home restraints which during those three years had been imposed upon him. Often had he been seized with an almost irresistible longing to fly from the tedious sameness, the almost unendurable routine, of his home life. Had Lady Millicent been only tolerably sympathetic--had she entered the least into their feelings--been but a few degrees less hard, less self-engrossed, and less unwilling to allow her children a few of the pleasures to which young flesh believes itself to be heir--it is more than probable that Horace would have been less anxious to escape from an existence which after all contained, as in