It was very near Christmas when Walter and Ally went to Penton on the visit which had caused so much excitement. It had been arranged that on Christmas-eve they should return, for to spend that day away from their family was impossible, a thing not to be done had the invitation come from royalty itself. They went with all their new things so nicely packed, and their hearts beating, and many warnings and recommendations from the most careful of mothers.

“Wat, be careful that you never, never let them see, if it was only by a look, that you do not agree with what your father is doing. You must not let him down among his relations. You must let them see that what he does—Oh, Wat, you must be very particular to show a proper pride. Don’t look as if you had any grudge; don’t let them suppose—”

“I hope I am not quite a fool,” said the indignant youth.

“A fool! I never thought you were a fool; but you are young, my dear boy, and you feel strongly. And, Ally! mind you don’t show that you are unaccustomed to the sort of service and waiting upon that is natural there. If your cousin offers to send her maid to help you, don’t you come out with, ‘Oh, no; I do everything for myself at home.’ I don’t want you to say anything that is not true. But, as a matter of fact, you don’t do everything for yourself at home. What does it matter to Mrs. Russell Penton whether you have a maid or whether it is Anne and I that help you? You always are helped, you know. Say, ‘Oh, I think I can manage quite well,’ or something of that sort.”

“But, mother, Cousin Alicia must know how we live, and that I have no maid at home.”

“Oh, they never think, these great ladies; they take it for granted that everybody has every thing just as they have. Most probably she would think it was my fault if she heard that you had no maid. And, Ally! don’t be so shy as you usually are; don’t keep behind backs; remember that the only thing you can do for people who wish you to stay with them is to be as friendly as possible, and to talk, and help to amuse them.”

“I—to amuse Cousin Alicia, mother!”

“Well, dear, as much as you can. Amuse perhaps is not the word: but you must not sit as if you were cut out of wood or stone. And, Wat! if there is shooting or anything going on, just do what the other gentlemen do. I have always heard that Mr. Russell Penton was very nice; you will be quite right if you keep your eye upon him.”

“One would think we were going to court, where there are all kinds of etiquettes, to hear you speak, mother.”

“Well, my dears, there are all sorts of etiquettes everywhere; and in one way it is easier at court, for if you don’t understand there is nothing wonderful in that, and every one is willing to tell you: whereas in a grand house you are supposed to know everything by nature. I don’t doubt at all that things will go on quite comfortably and all right. But, Ally, dear—”

“Mother, don’t bother her any more,” cried Anne. “She will be so frightened she will never venture to open her lips at all, for fear she should say something wrong. I wish it was only me.”

“Oh, so do I,” cried Ally, from the bottom of her heart.

“And I,” said Wat; “any one may have my share.”

“That is just how things are—always contrary, as Martha says. I should have rather enjoyed it. I should have liked to see everything. Cousin Alicia might have put on her icy face as much as she liked, she would not have frozen me. But we can’t change places now at the last moment, and the fly will have to be paid for if it waits. Come, Ally, come! for sooner or later you know you must go.”

Anne and her mother stood and watched the reluctant pair as they drove away with a mingled sense of envy and relief. The fly from the village was not a triumphal chariot; the old gray horse had a dilapidated aspect; the day was damp and rainy.

“We may be afloat before you come back,” said Anne, waving her hand.

And then they left the door and the house out of sight, and departed into the unknown. Into the unknown! If it had been to Russia it could not have been further away, nor could the habits and customs of a foreign country have been more alarming to the young adventurers. They were so much overawed that they said little to each other. Ally drew back into the corner of the carriage, Walter looked out of the opposite window. They were in a moment separated by half a world, though the same rug was tucked round both their knees. The boy looked out with an eagerness which he could scarcely conceal for something tangible, something of which his mind was full. The girl drew back into a vague delightful world of dreams in which there was nothing definite. Who was it that had said to her something about driving up unthinking to a door within which you might meet your fate. Who was it? she asked herself, and yet she remembered very well who it was; and as she drove along there rose before her a whole panorama of shifting, changing pictures. She was standing again by the muddy, turbid river, and hearing, as in a dream, the first words of wooing, the suggested devotion, the under-current of an inference which made her the chief interest, the center of the world: which is such a thing as may well startle any girl into attention. And then the scenery changed, and the new world opened, and other, vaguer figures, yet more wonderful, appeared about her, some of them with that same look in their eyes. How did Ally know what might be waiting for her in that home of romance, that wonderful house of Penton, with which all the visions of her life had been connected? Sometimes when one is not thinking one drives up to a door and finds inside one’s fate. What does that mean—one’s fate? Young Rochford had given her to understand that he had found his when he arrived at Penton Hook, and the words had vaguely seized upon Ally’s imagination, filling her with a curious thrill of sensation. His fate! She did not think of this with compunction or regret, as one who more thoroughly recognized what was meant might have done. It moved her rather to an excited, half-awed sense of power in herself which she did not understand before, than to any sympathy for him. She thought in the keen consciousness of awakening, of herself, and not of him. It was wrong; it was a guilty sort of selfishness: but she could not help it. His words, which had first opened her eyes—his looks, which perhaps a little earlier had lighted a spark of perception, had been like the sounding of the rÉveillÉ—like the rising of a morning star. She was not to blame for it; she had done nothing which could connect her with his fate, as he called it. It was a summons to her to behold and recognize her own position, the wonderful, mysterious position, which a woman—a girl—seemed to be born to, which she had been thrust into without any doing of hers.

When the fancy is first touched, the thoughts that follow are sweet—sweeter perhaps than anything that can succeed—in their perfectly indefinite exhilaration and vague sense of a personal beatitude that scarcely anything else can bring. This does not always mean love, which is a different effect. Ally knew nothing about love; she only felt in all her being the new and wonderful power of awakening motion in others, of which nobody had ever told her, and which she had never dreamed of as appertaining to herself. She had read of it as being possessed by others—by the beautiful maidens of romance, by ladies moving in those dazzling spheres of society which were altogether beyond the reach and even the desires of a little country girl. But Ally knew very well that she was not a great beauty, nor so clever and gifted as those heroines were who in novels and romances brought all the world to their feet. She entertained no delusions on this subject. She was not beautiful at all, nor clever at all. She was only Ally: and yet she had it in her power to bring that look into another’s eyes. It was more strange, more thrilling, sweet, confusing than words could say.

As for Walter, his imaginations were far more definite. They were very definite indeed, distant as every anticipation was. He looked out to see one figure, one face, which he could not look out upon calmly, with a spectator by his side, which he longed yet feared to behold in the daylight, in the midst of a world awake and observant, with Ally looking on. He expected nothing but to be questioned on the subject—to be asked what he was looking for, why he leaned out of the window, what there was to see. When it dawned upon him that Ally meant to ask no questions, that she had the air of taking no notice, he became suspicious and uneasy, thinking that she must mean something by her silence, that there was more in it than met the eye. By nature she would have asked him a hundred questions. She would have looked, too, wondering what he could possibly expect to see on the road or in the village that could be interesting. Walter said to himself that some report must have reached home of those expeditions of his to Crockford’s cottage, and that Ally must have been told to watch, not to excite his suspicions by questioning, to be on the alert for whatever might happen. He turned his back to her and blocked up the window with his head and shoulders as they drove past Crockford’s. And there, indeed, was the face he longed to see looking out from the cottage window, staring at him maliciously, with a smile which was not a smile of recognition, defying him, as it seemed, to own the acquaintance. A great panic was in Walter’s heart. To betray this secret, to make it visible to the eyes of the world—i. e., to the old rector, who, as ill-luck would have it, was strolling past at the moment, taking his afternoon walk, and of Ally watching him from her corner—was terrible to the young man. And to expose himself to be questioned—to be asked who she was (which he did not know), and where he had met her, and a hundred other details; perhaps to be solemnly warned that he must see her no more! All these reflections flashed through Walter’s spirit. She was evidently in the mind to take no notice of him, to own no acquaintance: and there were so many temptations on his side to do the same, to make his eyes do all his salutations, to avoid giving any satisfaction to the spies about. But his instincts as a gentleman were too much for Walter. He leaned a little further out of the window and took off his hat. How could he pass the place where she was, and look at her and make no sign? It was impossible! Walter took off his hat with a heroism scarcely to be surpassed on the perilous breach. It might be ruin; it might mean discovery, betrayal; he might be sent away, banished from his gates of paradise; but, whatever happened, he could not be disrespectful to her.

She did not return the salutation, but she opened the window and looked out after the carriage, putting out into the damp air what Walter within himself called her beautiful head. It was not, strictly speaking, a beautiful head, but it had various elements of beauty—dark eyes full of light; a crop of soft brown silky hair, clustering in curly short luxuriance; a complexion pale and clear, but lightly touched with color; and a mouth which was really a wonder of a mouth beside the ordinary developments of that universally defective feature. She looked after him with mockery in her eyes, which only attracted the foolish boy the more, and made him half frantic to spring from his place in the sight of the village and put himself at her feet. It would have cost her nothing to give him a smile, a wave of her hand; and there was no telling what it might cost him to have taken off his hat to her; but she was immovable. He gazed, as long as he could see anything, out of the carriage window. At least, if he had sacrificed himself he should get the good of it, and look, and look, as long as eyes could see.

“How d’ye do?—how d’ye do?’ cried the rector, waving his hand toward the carriage. Perhaps he thought that the salutation was for him, the old bat. Walter drew in his head again, and looked with keen suspicion at his sister in her corner, who raised her eyes, which seemed heavy (could she have been asleep?), with a dreamy sort of smile, totally unlike the smile of a spy maturing her observations, and asked,

“Who was that?”

“Who was what?”

“The voice,” said Ally, “in the street—‘How d’ye do?’”

“It was the rector—who else should it be? Do you mean to say you did not see him going along the road?”

“No, I did not see him,” said Ally, with that dreamy, imbecile sort of smile. She had seen nothing, noticed Nothing! And the rector had taken it for granted that the greeting had been for himself, and thought young Walter was very civil: and all had passed over with perfect safety, as if it had been the most natural thing in the world. Walter fell back into the other corner, and thus the brother and sister swung and jolted along, each in a beatitude and agitation of his (and her) own. Perhaps there was a subtle sort of sympathy in the silence. They did not say anything to each other until they had turned in at the gates, and were stumbling along the avenue at Penton under the pine-trees, all bare and moaning. This roused them instinctively, although their dreams were more absorbing than anything else in earth or heaven.

“Here we are at last,” said Ally, rousing herself, but speaking under her breath.

“Not yet; don’t you know the avenue is nearly a mile long? And don’t be frightened—remember what mother said.”

“Oh, not frightened,” she cried, but caught her breath a little. “Wat, I wish it was over, and we were going home.”

“So do I, Ally; but we must go through with it now we are here.”

“Oh, I suppose so. Will she be waiting at the door, do you think, or come to meet us? or will they tell us she is out, and offer to show us our rooms, and send us tea?”

“As they do in novels to the poor relations? I hope they will have better taste,” said Walter, growing red, “than to try the poor relation dodge with us. Oh, no! Mrs. Russell Penton knows that she is still more or less in our power.”

“I wish the first was over,” said Ally; “it may not perhaps seem so dreadful after that.”

And in this not ecstatic state of mind they drew up at the door, where the footman who came out looked with contempt at the shabby village fly. Mrs. Russell Penton had been walking, and was coming in at that moment, with a little chubby-faced girl by her side. Cousin Alicia and her companion took in every feature of the shabby fly, the old horse, the driver with his patched coat, as they came forward. It was almost more dreadful than what Walter called “the poor relation dodge,” though Mrs. Russell Penton was so civil as to come to the door of the fly, which was difficult to open, to receive her visitors. Already, before even they entered the house, their poverty had thus been put to shame. Neither of them, indeed, made much account of the little round-faced stranger who stood looking on, with her mouth a little open, watching their disembarkation. Nothing could look more insignificant than this little girl did. She might have been a little waiting-maid, an attendant, not smart enough for a soubrette; even Mrs. Russell Penton took no notice, did not introduce her, but left her standing as if she were of no importance, while she herself conducted Ally upstairs. Walter himself, in the confusion of the arrival, had nearly followed without thinking. But fortunately (which was a great satisfaction to him afterward) that habit of good-breeding which would not let him pass Crockford’s cottage without taking off his hat, inspired him to stand back, and let the little maid, as he thought her, pass in before him. She did this with a little blush and shy bow, and ran through the hall out of sight, as a little person in what was presumably her position would do; and Walter followed his sister upstairs. He felt that there was nothing to complain of in the matter of their reception, at least. They were not being treated as poor relations. Whatever might happen afterward, there was a certain soothing in that.