She had arranged their
rooms, making everything warm and pretty. Out of her own pocket she
had bought a shot-belt for one, and skates for the other. She had
told the old groom that her pony was to belong exclusively to Master
Harry for the holidays, and now Harry told her that still waters ran
deep. She had been driven to the use of all her eloquence in
inducing her father to purchase that gun for Frank, and now Frank
called her a Puritan. And why? She did not choose that a mistletoe
bough should be hung in her father's hall, when Godfrey Holmes was
coming to visit him. She could not explain this to Frank, but Frank
might have had the wit to understand it. But Frank was thinking
only of Patty Coverdale, a blue-eyed little romp of sixteen, who,
with her sister Kate, was coming from Penrith to spend the Christmas
at Thwaite Hall. Elizabeth left the room with her slow, graceful
step, hiding her tears,--hiding all emotion, as latterly she had
taught herself that it was feminine to do. "There goes my lady
Fineairs," said Harry, sending his shrill voice after her.
Thwaite Hall was not a place of much pretension. It was a moderate-
sized house, surrounded by pretty gardens and shrubberies, close
down upon the river Eamont, on the Westmoreland side of the river,
looking over to a lovely wooded bank in Cumberland.
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