Letitia found herself at the apex of the happiness she most desired, when she ascertained finally that she knew everybody--scarcely one was left out, and those who were left out were the insignificant people for whose opinion nobody cared. She made a capital wife. She knew a great deal about housekeeping and how to make a little go a long way, and as she was very quick and kept her eyes wide open wherever she went, she very soon picked up those minutiæ of comfort and domestic luxury which were not understood at Grocombe. Grocombe, in fact, passed away altogether like a dissolving view. Sometimes when she sat in the boudoir which everybody said she had made so delightful, with its soft chairs and mossy carpets, and bewildering drapery, there would come before Letitia’s eyes a vision of the shabby parlor at home with its horsehair sofa and thin Kidderminster. The curtains were maroon rep in that family abode. The cover on the table was red and blue worsted: there was not a cosy chair in the place. It is true that there was a drawing-room in Grocombe, but everything in it was falling to pieces and it was never used. What a house to have been brought up in! And what a difference between Tisch Ravelstone, the hard-riding squire’s neglected daughter, who had never been educated, or dressed, or looked after by any one, whom the parson’s wife had been sorry for, who had been invited to the vicarage out of kindness, who had once thought the vicar’s son when he returned from Oxford the most splendid of young persons, and the Honorable Mrs. John Parke in her own beautiful boudoir, with her fine dresses and respectful servants and luxurious prosperity! What a difference! Letitia never permitted it to be seen or even divined that such luxury was new to her. But sometimes there would gleam before her a fading dissolving vision of that other life, and she would ask herself was it possible? Could it ever have been? To go back to such a state of affairs now would be the most horrible misfortune. She said to herself that she would rather die. It is true that the moors were glorious round about that Yorkshire house, but Letitia had seen too much of them to care for the moors: and the stables were admirably arranged, the pride of the district, but Letitia had seen a great deal too much of them and hated stables. And when she thought of the miry ways through which she used to tramp in her Wellington boots and short skirts, and the wintry blighted fir wood, all blown one way as if the trees were shabby pilgrims going to the west, which surrounded the house and the garden in which a few straggling rose bushes and old-fashioned flowers formed a respectful border to the cabbages, Letitia drew a long breath. Oh-h! she said to herself. What a difference! what a difference! But this breath of wondering transport was only breathed when she sat alone in her boudoir and John was well out of the way, and could not look up with an “Eh? did you speak?”