North and South

For most of the last ten years, Margaret Hale had lived in London with her aunt, Mrs. Shaw, and her cousin Edith.Now the house was in a happy uproar, for Edith was to be married the next morning to Captain Lennox.There were flowers everywhere, and boxes of new clothes, and callers all day long.

Margaret had shared Edith’s lessons and her London seasons, but every summer she had gone back to Helstone, her father’s country parsonage.Helstone was a small village on the edge of a great forest in the south of England, and Margaret loved it more than any place on earth.When the wedding was over she would go home to Helstone for good, and the thought filled her with a quiet happiness.

That evening, after a dinner party, the ladies sat in the drawing-room while the gentlemen stayed downstairs over their wine.Edith had fallen asleep on the sofa in her white dress, looking like a picture.Mrs. Shaw, a comfortable, fretful widow, worried aloud about Edith going so far away, to the regiment’s post on the island of Corfu.

Mrs. Shaw had married a much older man for his money and had been perfectly comfortable ever since.Yet now she liked to speak of Edith’s marriage as a pure love-match, and to sigh over how romantic it all was.Margaret listened politely, and said little.

Mr. Henry Lennox, the bridegroom’s clever lawyer brother, came up from the dining-room and sat down beside Margaret.He asked her to describe Helstone, and she said it was “like a village in a poem — in one of Tennyson’s poems.”She told him of the old grey church, the cottages half hidden in roses, and the great trees of the forest, and he half teased and half envied her for loving it so.

Before bed, Mrs. Shaw made Margaret stand still and model the soft Indian shawls that were part of Edith’s wedding gifts, heavy and warm and smelling of sandalwood.Margaret stood patient among the silks, thinking all the while of the forest paths at Helstone, and of going home.