"Humph!" replied the yeoman: "I do not call those public matters. I think I have said nothing but what every good Christian should say amen to. I don't see how anybody can help saying 'tis better to be in the hands of the Lord than of men, not I." "Nor I, indeed!" exclaimed Lady Nithsdale with fervour. "O Lord, take us into thy hands, and deal with us according to thy mercy!" "Well, that's much what I said, only not in such a way. Verily, if I don't believe she is one of the new Dissenters that have sprung up of late!" Amy Evans, anxious to withdraw observation from her lady, asked him some question concerning his flock; and, affecting great interest in such matters, she was enabled, from her youthful Welsh education, to converse with sufficient knowledge of the subject to lead the honest unsuspicious farmer into a detail of his own plans and systems, in which he readily forgot what had at first excited his surprise in the bearing of the silent and serious young gentlewoman. By the time they reached York, his prediction concerning the weather was fully verified: the wheels of the heavy vehicle could scarcely cut through the deep snow; and so slow was their progress, that it had long been dark before the stage arrived at its destination in one of the most dismal streets of the ancient city of York. The snow continued to fall during the whole of the night, and the next morning the roads were found to be so totally impassable, that not only were all stage-coaches and carriages of every description arrested in their progress, but the post itself was stopped. Lady Nithsdale's disappointment amounted almost to despair. Every hour was precious. The letter which announced her husband's wish to see her had already been somewhat delayed on the road, and the duchess said that on her exertions might depend the mode in which his case might be looked upon. She thought, too, on his desolate, his forlorn condition; she judged from her own feelings how intensely he must desire her presence; and she deemed any hardship, any suffering, preferable to the mental anxiety of being shut up in York, unable to hear of him, to communicate with him, to exert herself for him. The long period of suspense and of forced inactivity which she had passed at Terreagles had been almost insupportably irksome; and now, when her lord had expressed a wish for her company, when possibly she might be of real service to him, to be imprisoned in a dismal room in an inn at York:--it was an infliction not to be endured.