Horace. He took refuge in silent contempt and sneers of unacknowledged mortification, disdaining the pleasure, yet galled in himself not to comprehend how it was. CHAPTER XIV. Meanwhile Colonel Sutherland and his niece drove along the bare and exposed moorland road with very different sentiments. Susan could not feel any cold, could not allow herself to suppose that any landscape more delightful or weather more entirely satisfactory was to be found anywhere in the world. She pitied the poor people shut up in a close carriage, whom they passed at a little distance from Marchmain. She appealed to her uncle if a gig was not of all other kinds of conveyance the most delightful. She listened to his stories of travel in India, with all its elephants and camels, and of the still more miraculous railway at home, with equal admiration and wonder, as things equally unlikely to come under her own observation, and enjoyed her present extraordinary felicity all the more from thinking how unlikely it was to occur again. Everything concurred to put Susan in the highest spirits--her freedom, her kind protector, the novelty of her position, the wondering looks cast at her from the cottages they passed, the involuntary respect excited by her companion, the air, the sunshine--even the fine shawl, though it was entirely covered by her other wrappings and nobody could see it--all contributed towards the full and joyous satisfaction of her young mind. She put Peggy's great old-fashioned veil, with its big beetles, up from her face--she was not afraid of the wind, or of taking cold, or of anything else in the world; and as the horizon gradually widened, and the road extended out of the immediate vicinity of her home, Susan's delight increased. She declared the hills went faster than they did, and kept continually receding, and every new opening of the landscape increased her pleasure. The Colonel listened to all her admiring exclamations with a smiling face; he told her of his own neighbourhood, a fairer and richer country. He spoke of the visit she must make him shortly, and of all the places he should take her to. The wind blew cold in their faces, with by no means a balmy or genial breath; but then their hearts were so fortified with warm affections and honest happiness, that the cold did not hurt them. Little by little they fell into more particular conversation. Colonel Sutherland was interested and concerned about Horace, anxious to know how to help him; but he was not and could not be confidential with his nephew, whereas his heart flew open to Susan as at a touch of magic. He could not help speaking of everything which moved when he had gained her ear, and had her to himself alone. He had told her all about young Roger Musgrave before he was aware, and about Kennedy's story, and his own vexation and annoyance to find that the young stranger had not dealt quite truly by him.