"Oh, I can hold her. She has a good mouth and perfect temper; she never ran away from me but once," said Bessie, caressing her old favorite with voice and hand. "And what happened on that occasion?" said Mr. Cecil Burleigh. "She had her fling, and nothing happened. It was along the road that skirts the Brook pastures, and at the sharp turn Mr. Harry Musgrave saw her coming--head down, the bit in her teeth--and threw open the gate, and we dashed into the clover. As I did not lose my nerve or tumble off, I am never afraid now. I love a good gallop." Mr. Cecil Burleigh asked no more questions. If it be true that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh, Brook and Mr. Harry Musgrave must have been much in Miss Fairfax's thoughts; this was now the third time that she had found occasion to mention them since coming to breakfast. Lady Latimer turned in-doors again with a preoccupied air. Bessie had looked behind her as she rode down the avenue, as if she were bidding them good-bye. Mr. Cecil Burleigh was silent too. He had come to Fairfield with certain lively hopes and expectations, for which my lady was mainly responsible, and already he was experiencing sensations of blankness worse to bear than disappointment. Others might be perplexed as to Miss Fairfax's sentiments, but to him they were clear as the day--friendly, but nothing more. She was now where she would be, was exuberantly contented, and could not hide how slight a tie upon her had been established by a year amongst her kindred in Woldshire. "This is like old times, Bessie," said the doctor as the Fairfield gate closed behind them. Bessie laughed and tossed her head like a creature escaped. "Yes, I am so happy!" she answered. The ride was just one of the doctor's regular rounds. He had to call at Brook, where a servant was ill, and they went by the high-road to the manor. Harry Musgrave was not at home. He had gone out for a day's ranging, and was pensively pondering his way through the bosky recesses of the Forest, under the unbroken silence of the tall pines, to the seashore and the old haunts of the almost extinct race of smugglers. The first person they met after leaving the manor was little Christie with a pale radiant face, having just come on a perfect theme for a picture--a still woodland pool reflecting high broken banks and flags and rushes, with slender birchen trees hanging over, and a cluster of low reed-thatched huts, very uncomfortable to live in, but gloriously mossed and weather-stained to paint. "Don't linger here too late--it is an unwholesome spot," said Mr. Carnegie, warning him as he rode on. Little Christie set up his white umbrella in the sun, and kings might have envied him. "My mother is better, but call and see her," he cried after the doctor; this amendment was one cause of the artist's blitheness.