Caroline had sufficiently improved as greatly to decrease solicitude on her account: though there was still a want of sufficient humility, a too great proneness to trust implicitly in her own strength, an inclination to prejudice, and a love of admiration, which all made Mrs. Hamilton fear would expose her to some personal sorrow ere they were entirely overcome. To produce eternal good, she might not murmur at temporal suffering; but her fond heart, though it could anticipate it calmly for herself, so shrunk from it, as touching her child, that the nearer approached the period of Caroline's introduction to the gay world, the more painfully anxious she became, and the more gladly would she have retained her in the retirement of Oakwood, where all her better and higher qualities alone had play. But she knew this could not be; and she could only _trust_ that her anxiety would be proved as groundless with Caroline, as every letter from Oxford proved it to be with Percy, and _endeavor_ to avert it by never wavering in her watchful and guiding love.
Emmeline, at fifteen, was just the same sportive, happy, innocent child as she had been at twelve. Her feelings were, indeed, still deeper, her imagination more vivid, her religion more fervid. To her every thing was touched with poetry--it mattered not how dull and commonplace it might seem to other people; but Mrs. Hamilton's judicious care had so taught that _Truth_ alone was poetry and beauty--the Ideal only lovable when its basis was the Real--that she was neither romantic nor visionary. Keen as her sensibilities were, even over a work of fiction, they prompted the _deed_ and _act_ of kindness, not the tear alone. For miles round her father's large domain she was known, loved, so felt as a guardian spirit, that the very sound of her step seemed to promise joy. She actually seemed to live for others--making their pleasures hers; and, withal, so joyous, especially in her own home and at Greville Manor, that even anxiety seemed exorcised when she was near. Before strangers, indeed, she would be as shy as a young fawn; though even then natural kindliness of heart prompted such kindness of word and manner, as always to excite the wish to see her again.