Patches of snow gleamed on the misty heights of Helvellyn, and the autumn winds howled and shrieked around Fellside in the evenings, when all the shutters were shut, and the outside world seemed little more than an idea: that mystic hour when the sheep are slumbering under the starry sky, and when, as the Westmoreland peasant believes, the fairies help the housewife at her spinning-wheel.
Those October evenings were very long and weary for Lesbia and her sister.

Lady Maulevrier read and mused in her low chair beside the fire, with her books piled upon her own particular table, and lighted by her own particular lamp.

She talked very little, but she was always gracious to her granddaughters and their governess, and she liked them to be with her in the evening.

Lesbia played or sang, or sat at work at her basket-table, which occupied the other side of the fireplace; and Fraeulein and Mary had the rest of the room to themselves, as it were, those two places by the hearth being sacred, as if dedicated to household gods.

Mary read immensely in those long evenings, devouring volume after volume, feeding her imagination with every kind of nutriment, good, bad, and indifferent.