“I shall be glad to have a letter from you soon, letting me know what you will do. You would have a cheerful life with me, I think. I am myself a person of uncommonly lively disposition, though I have known so many of the more refined sorrows of life; and the freshness of youth is a delightful study. I feel I shall grow quite a child in sympathy with your little girl. Pray come--Hampstead is a delightful locality; so near London, too, and within reach of society so very excellent--and I am sure you would find the change greatly for your daughter’s good. “With much regard and kind feeling to both her and you, I am affectionately yours, “ANNIE LAURIE.” “To Hampstead! to London!” Menie says nothing more, but her eyes shine upon her mother’s with a restless glow of appeal. London holds many a wonder to the young curious heart which yet knows nothing of the world, and London holds Randall Home. “You would like to go, Menie? But how we should like this aunt of yours is a different story,” said Mrs Laurie; “and for my part, I am very well content with Burnside.” “It is true she calls me a little girl,” said Menie, turning to her own particular grievance; “but I should think she means everything very kindly, for all that.” “Fantastic old wife!” said Mrs Laurie, with a little impatient derision, not unlike Jenny’s fuff. “She was older than your father, Menie--a woman near sixty, I’ll warrant; and _she_ has made up her mind never to marry--did ever anybody hear the like! But you need not look so disappointed either. Put away the letter--we’ll take a night’s rest on it, and then we’ll decide.” But Menie read it over once more before she laid it aside, and Menie betrayed her anxiety about the decision in a hundred questions which her mother could not answer. Mrs Laurie had only once been in London, and could tell nothing of Hampstead, the only reminiscence remaining with her being of a verdant stretch of turf, all dinted over with little mounds and hollows rich in green fern and furze, which the benighted natives called a heath. Born within sight of Lochar Moss, Mrs Laurie laughed the pretensions of this metropolitan heath to scorn. CHAPTER III.