to make all the arrangements for the journey.
"Sir Percival" has settled that we leave on such
a day; " Sir Percival" has decided that we
travel by such a road. Sometimes she writes,
"Percival" only, but very seldom—in nine cases
out of ten, she gives him his title.

I cannot find that his habits and opinions have
changed and coloured hers in any single particular.
The usual moral transformation which
is insensibly wrought in a young, fresh, sensitive
woman by her marriage, seems never to have
taken place in Laura. She writes of her own
thoughts and impressions, amid all the wonders
she has seen, exactly as she might have written
to some one else, if I had been travelling with
her instead of her husband. I see no betrayal
anywhere, of sympathy of any kind existing
between them. Even when she wanders from
the subject of her travels, and occupies herself
with the prospects that await her in England,
her speculations are busied with her future as
my sister, and persistently neglect to notice her
future as Sir Percival's wife. In all this, there
is no under tone of complaint, to warn me that
she is absolutely unhappy in her married life.
The impression I have derived from our
correspondence does not, thank God, lead me to any
such distressing conclusion as that. I only see
a sad torpor, an unchangeable indifference, when
I turn my mind from her in the old character
of a sister, and look at her, through the medium
of her letters, in the new character of a wife.
In other words, it is always Laura Fairlie who
has been writing to me for the last six months,
and never Lady Glyde.

The strange silence which she maintains on
the subject of her husband's character and
conduct, she preserves with almost equal resolution
in the few references which her later letters
contain to the name of her husband's bosom friend,
Count Fosco.

For some unexplained reason, the Count and
his wife appear to have changed their plans
abruptly, at the end of last autumn, and to have
gone to Vienna, instead of going to Rome, at
which latter place Sir Percival had expected to
find them when he left England. They only
quitted Vienna in the spring, and travelled as
far as the Tyrol to meet the bride and
bridegroom on their homeward journey. Laura
writes readily enough about the meeting with
Madame Fosco, and assures me that she has
found her aunt so much changed for the better
—so much quieter and so much more sensible as
a wife than she was as a single woman—that I
shall hardly know her again when I see her here.
But, on the subject of Count Fosco (who
interests me infinitely more than his wife), Laura is
provokingly circumspect and silent. She only
says that he puzzles her, and that she will not
tell me what her impression of him is, until I
have seen him, and formed my own opinion first.
This, to my mind, looks ill for the Count.
Laura has preserved, far more perfectly than
most people do in later life, the child's subtle
faculty of knowing a friend by instinct; and, if
I am right in assuming that her first impression
of Count Fosco has not been favourable, I, for
one, am in some danger of doubting and distrusting
that illustrious foreigner before I have so
much as set eyes on him. But, patience,
patience; this uncertainty, and many uncertainties
more, cannot last much longer. To-
morrow will see all my doubts in a fair way of
being cleared up, sooner or later.

Twelve o'clock has struck; and I have just
come back to close these pages, after looking out
at my open window.

It is a still, sultry, moonless night. The
stars are dull and few. The trees that shut out
the view on all sides, look dimly black and solid
in the distance, like a great wall of rock. I hear
the croaking of frogs, faint and far off; and the
echoes of the great clock bell hum in the airless
calm, long after the strokes have ceased. I
wonder how Blackwater Park will look in the
daytime? I don't altogether like it by night.

28th.—A day of investigations and discoveries
—a more interesting day, for many reasons, than
I had ventured to anticipate.

I began my sight-seeing, of course, with the
house.

The main body of the building is of the time
of that highly overrated woman, Queen Elizabeth.
On the ground floor, there are two hugely long
galleries, with low ceilings, lying parallel with
each other, and rendered additionally dark and
dismal by hideous family portraits—every one of
which I should like to burn. The rooms on the
floor above the two galleries, are kept in
tolerable repair, but are very seldom used. The
civil housekeeper, who acted as my guide,
offered to show me over them; but considerately
added that she feared I should find them rather
out of order. My respect for the integrity of
my own petticoats and stockings, infinitely
exceeds my respect for all the Elizabethan
bedrooms in the kingdom; so I positively declined
exploring the upper regions of dust and dirt at
the risk of soiling my nice clean clothes. The
housekeeper said, "I am quite of your opinion,
miss;" and appeared to think me the most
sensible woman she had met with for a long time
past.

So much, then, for the main building. Two
wings are added, at either end of it. The
half-ruined wing on the left (as you approach
the house) was once a place of residence standing
by itself, and was built in the fourteenth
century. One of Sir Percival's maternal ancestors
—I don't remember, and don't care, which
—tacked on the main building, at right angles
to it, in the aforesaid Queen Elizabeth's time.
The housekeeper told me that the architecture
of "the old wing," both outside and inside, was
considered remarkably fine by good judges. On
further investigation, I discovered that good
judges could only exercise their abilities on Sir
Percival's piece of antiquity by previously
dismissing from their minds all fear of damp,
darkness, andfioo rats. Under these circumstances, I
unhesitatingly acknowledged myself to be no
judge at all; and suggested that we should treat