Tibbie was in constant dread of his burning the house down, so incalculable and preposterous were his hours, and the Colonel, longing to render the house a perfect shrine for his bride, found it hard to tolerate the fumes with which her brother saturated it.  If he had been sure that opium formed no portion of Edward’s solace, his counsel to Alison would have been less decisive.  To poor little Rose, her father was an abiding perplexity and distress; she wanted to love him, and felt it absolute naughtiness to be constantly disappointed by his insensibility to her approaches, or else repelled and disgusted by that vice of the Russian sheep.  And a vague hint of being transported to the Ural mountains, away from Aunt Ermine, had haunted her of late more dreadfully than even the lions of old; so that the relief was ineffable when her dear Colonel confided to her that she was to be his niece and Aunt Ermine’s handmaid, sent her to consult with Tibbie on her new apartment, and invited Augustus to the most eligible hole in the garden.  The grotto that Rose, Conrade, and Francis proceeded to erect with pebbles and shells, was likely to prove as alarming to that respectable reptile as a model cottage to an Irish peasant.

Ermine had dropped all scruples about Rose’s intercourse with other children, and the feeling that she might associate with them on equal terms, perhaps, was the most complete assurance of Edward’s restoration.  She was glad that companionship should render the little maiden more active and childlike, for Edward’s abstraction had made her believe that there might be danger in indulging the dreaminess of the imaginative child.

No one welcomed the removal of these restraints more warmly than Lady Temple.  She was perhaps the happiest of the happy, for with her there was no drawback, no sorrow, no parting to fear.  Her first impulse, when Colonel Keith came to tell her his plans, was to seize on hat and shawl, and rush down to Mackarel Lane to kiss Ermine with all her heart, and tell her that “it was the most delightful thing of her to have consented at last, for nobody deserved so well to be happy as that dear Colonel;” and then she clung to Alison, declaring that now she should have her all to herself, and if she would only come to Myrtlewood, she would do her very best to make her comfortable there, and it should be her home—­her home always.

“In fact,” said Ermine, afterwards to the Colonel, “when you go to Avoncester, I think you may as well get a licence for the wedding of Alison Williams and Fanny Temple at the same time.  There has been quite a courtship on the lady’s part.”