"Yes," said the admiral, "it will; we shall have it from south by east. And, d'ye hear, Tom Sedley? I--I've been thinking there's no need to make any fuss about this--this thing; just let it be as if you had never said a word about it, do you mind, and come here just as usual. Let us put it out of our heads; and if you find matters improve, and still wish it, there's nothing to prevent your speaking to me; only Agnes is perfectly free, you understand, and you are not to make any change in your demeanour--a--or--I mean to be more with my daughters, or anything _marked_, you understand. People begin to talk here, you know, in the club-house, on very slight grounds! and--and--you understand now; and there mustn't be any nonsense; and I like you, sir--I like you, Thomas Sedley; I do--I do, indeed, sir." And old Vane Etherage gave him a very friendly shake by the hand, and Tom thanked him gratefully, and went away reprieved, and took a walk with the girls, and told them, as they expressed it, _everything_; and Vane Etherage thought it incumbent on him to soften matters a little by asking him to dinner; and Tom accepted; and when they broke up after tea, there was another mistake discovered about the hour, and Miss Charity most emphatically announced that it was _perfectly unaccountable_, and must _never_ occur again; and I hope, for the sake of the venerable man who sat up, resigned and affronted, to secure the hall-door and put out the lamps after the party had broken up, that these irregular hours were kept no more at Hazelden. CHAPTER VII. ARCADIAN RED BRICK, LILAC, AND LABURNUM. AS time proceeds, renewal and decay, its twin principles of mutation, are everywhere and necessarily active, applying to the moral as well as to the material world. Affections displace and succeed one another. The most beautiful are often the first to die. Characteristics in their beginning, minute and unsubstantial as the fairy brood that people the woodland air, enlarge and materialize till they usurp the dominion of the whole man, and the people and the world are changed. Sir Booth Fanshawe is away at Paris just now, engaged in a great negotiation, which is to bring order out of chaos, and inform him at last what he is really worth _per annum_. Margaret and her cousin, Miss Sheckleton, have revisited England; their Norman retreat is untenanted for the present. With the sorrow of a great concealment upon her, with other sorrows that she does not tell, Margaret looks sad and pale. In a small old suburban house, that stands alone, with a rural affectation, on a little patch of shorn grass, embowered in lilacs and laburnums, and built of a deep vermillion brick, the residence of these ladies is established.