“Your home is here until you marry, Elizabeth,” he rejoined in a tone that forbade contradiction.  “You shall visit Lady Latimer, but subject to permission.  Remember you are a Fairfax.  Though you may go back to the Forest, it is a delusion to imagine that you can live comfortably in the crowded household where you were happy as a child.  You have been six years absent; three of them you have spent in the luxurious ease of Abbotsmead.  You have acquired the tastes and habits of your own class—­a very different class.  You must look to me now:  your pittance is not enough for the common necessaries of life.”

“Not so very different a class, Uncle Laurence, and fortunately I am not in bondage to luxurious ease,” Bessie said.  “But I will not be perverse.  Changes come without seeking, and I am of an adaptable disposition.  The other day I was supposed to be a great heiress—­to-day I have no more than a bare competence.”

“Not even that, but if you marry suitably you may be sure that I shall make you a suitable settlement,” rejoined her kinsman.  Bessie speculated in silence and many times again what her uncle Laurence might mean by “suitably,” but they had no explanation, and the occasion passed.

Bessie’s little fortune was vested in the hands of trustees, and settled absolutely to her own use.  She could not anticipate her income nor make away with it, which Mr. Carnegie said was a very good thing.  Beyond that remark, and a generous reminder that her old nest under the thatch was ready for her whenever she liked to return and take possession, nothing was said in the letters from Beechhurst about her grandfather’s will or her new vicissitude.  She had some difficulty in writing to announce her latest change to Harry Musgrave, but he wrote back promptly and decisively to set her heart at rest, telling her that to his notions her fortune was a very pretty fortune, and avowing a prejudice against being maintained by his wife:  he would greatly prefer that she should be dependent upon him.  Bessie, who was a loving woman far more than a proud or ambitious one, was pleased by his assurance, and in answering him again she confessed that would have been her choice too.  Nevertheless, she became rather impatient to see him and talk the matter over—­the more so because Harry manifested little curiosity to learn anything of her family affairs unless they immediately affected herself.  He told her that he should be able to go down to Brook at the end of August, and he begged her to meet him there.  This she promised, and it was understood between them that if she was not invited to Fairfield she would go to the doctor’s house, even though the boys might be at home for their holidays.