"At first I was afraid to say, or even to allow myself to think, he showed me any preference, but Maud thought from the first that he was struck, and I asked her not to appear at all until everything was settled, for you know how attractive she is. But I really don't think that even then I thought that there was anything serious in it." (For an intelligent woman Eliza's letter strikes one as being strangely lacking in concentration.) "I have just been to the meeting of the Browning Society--our first appearance in public together--and I read my paper on "The Real Strafford," but I could hardly keep my voice steady all the time. I wear his own signet-ring for the present, but we are going up to London next week, when he will buy me a hoop of pearls. I am sure that you will be glad to hear that he is comfortably off. When the right man comes preconceived objections to matrimony vanish, _but it must be the right man_."
Palestrina said that she was "thrilled" to hear of Eliza's engagement, because an engagement was always thrilling, and she instantly went to tell the news to Mr. Ellicomb. She told me afterwards that when she had said that one of the Jamiesons was engaged Mr. Ellicomb became suddenly very pale in his complexion, and exclaimed, in a most anxious tone of voice, "Which?"
The cold weather has set in very suddenly, and already there is a sprinkling of snow on some of the distant hills. The robins still sing cheerily, but the gulls on the shore, flying over the yellow seaweed, call to each other plaintively in the gray of the early twilight. The heavy-winged herons stand in an attitude of serious thought for hours on the cold rocks; then, as if suddenly making up their minds to something, they stretch out their red legs behind them, and flop with large wings over the waters of the loch. The red Virginian creeper has begun to drop its leaves regretfully, after a night or two of white frost, and the dahlias hang their heads, heavy with the moisture which their cups contain. The sun wakes late in the mornings now, but shines strong and warm when it does get up. Cottage lights and fires burn cheerily o' nights, and within the cottages the old folks and the young ones draw round the fires and speak eerily of wraiths and whaurlochs, and some will tell of death-lights which they have seen on the lonely shore road. The herring fishers who sail away in the early twilight wear good stout jerseys now, and red woollen "crauvats" which the "wumman at hame" has knitted. The _Lord_ has sailed away to Dunoon to lay up for the winter, and the shepherds have gone away down South "to winter the hogs." The shepherds' wives sit alone in the little hillside cottages away up on the face of the brae, and "mak dae" with their slender money till their men come home again.