limes ended in a level of corn and pastures, which often seemed to melt into a lake under the setting sun.  This was the happy side of the house, for the south and east looked rather melancholy even under the brightest morning.  The grounds here were more confined, the flower-beds showed no very careful tendance, and large clumps of trees, chiefly of sombre yews, had risen high, not ten yards from the windows.  The building, of greenish stone, was in the old English style, not ugly, but small-windowed and melancholy-looking:  the sort of house that must have children, many flowers, open windows, and little vistas of bright things, to make it seem a joyous home.  In this latter end of autumn, with a sparse remnant of yellow leaves falling slowly athwart the dark evergreens in a stillness without sunshine, the house too had an air of autumnal decline, and Mr. Casaubon, when he presented himself, had no bloom that could be thrown into relief by that background.

“Oh dear!” Celia said to herself, “I am sure Freshitt Hall would have been pleasanter than this.”  She thought of the white freestone, the pillared portico, and the terrace full of flowers, Sir James smiling above them like a prince issuing from his enchantment in a rose-bush, with a handkerchief swiftly metamorphosed from the most delicately odorous petals—­Sir James, who talked so agreeably, always about things which had common-sense in them, and not about learning!  Celia had those light young feminine tastes which grave and weatherworn gentlemen sometimes prefer in a wife; but happily Mr. Casaubon’s bias had been different, for he would have had no chance with Celia.

Dorothea, on the contrary, found the house and grounds all that she could wish:  the dark book-shelves in the long library, the carpets and curtains with colors subdued by time, the curious old maps and bird’s-eye views on the walls of the corridor, with here and there an old vase below, had no oppression for her, and seemed more cheerful than the easts and pictures at the Grange, which her uncle had long ago brought home from his travels—­they being probably among the ideas he had taken in at one time.  To poor Dorothea these severe classical nudities and smirking Renaissance-Correggiosities were painfully inexplicable, staring into the midst of her Puritanic conceptions:  she had never been taught how she could bring them into any sort of relevance with her life.  But the owners of Lowick apparently had not been travellers, and Mr. Casaubon’s studies of the past were not carried on by means of such aids.

Dorothea walked about the house with delightful emotion.  Everything seemed hallowed to her:  this was to be the home of her wifehood, and she looked up with eyes full of confidence to Mr. Casaubon when he drew her attention specially to some actual arrangement and asked her if she would like an alteration.  All appeals to her taste she met gratefully, but saw nothing to alter.  His efforts at exact courtesy and formal tenderness had no defect for her.  She filled up all blanks with unmanifested perfections, interpreting him as she interpreted the works of Providence, and accounting for seeming discords by her own deafness to the higher harmonies.  And there are many blanks left in the weeks of courtship which a loving faith fills with happy assurance.