Breakfast and the discussion were unusually prolonged, the only impression left on the young lady’s romantic, impressible, and inexperienced mind being that her parents were unaccountably harsh to her, and unjust to Mr. Laurence, in her eyes the beau-ideal of a man. Such a figure and such a face could only enshrine divinity. And if he was a little wild, so were all heroes at his age. Let not the inexperienced young girl be over-much condemned for this. The opinion generally prevailed in her day; she had heard the sentiment expressed in farces on the stage, in society at home and elsewhere; even her own father’s hospitality trended in the same direction. Mrs. Ashton was a woman of her word. The door in Mosley Street was closed against Mr. Laurence Aspinall, and James was incorruptible. But the teaching of Miss Bohanna’s library being that Love was far-seeing and parents were blind, it followed that Miss Augusta (who would have resented any supposition of wilful disobedience or intentional disrespect towards the good father and mother she loved so dearly) met the fascinating gentleman (always by chance) either at her cousin’s in Marsden Square or in her walks abroad, and scented billet-doux came and went between the leaves of four-volumed romances, which Cicily carried to and from the library. One of these fell into Mrs. Ashton’s hands, when finding her advice contemned, she took measures to check this premature and clandestine love-making, as she thought, effectually. CHAPTER THE THIRTY-FIFTH. AT CARR COTTAGE. Tom Hulme was most anxious to get back to Whaley-Bridge and the mill, and motherly Bess was equally uneasy to return to her poor little Sim, afraid lest he should tax his grandfather’s strength over-much, or meet with some fresh accident. Yet more than a week elapsed before her husband was fit to travel, and in the interim Mr. Ashton had himself gone thither to ascertain how the new substitute filled the post. He was still at Carr Cottage when the “Lord Nelson” stopped at the end of the avenue, and Jabez, with fragile Sim mounted on his shoulder, trotted down to the gate to welcome Bess and her invalid home. They had travelled inside, but John Loudon Mac-Adam had not yet been appointed “Surveyor of Roads,” and Tom Hulme had suffered severely from the jolting of the coach. Bess clasped her child tenderly, and held him up for his father’s kiss; but she put him down to walk on before them (he could not run), whilst she and Jabez helped the injured corporal to ascend the steep incline. Old Simon, who seemed to have got a new lease of life from the invigorating country air and occupation, had already breakfasted, and was in the bean-field gathering the first ripe pods for a dinner of beans and bacon.