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198 Pharisee, are constant until death. Wild Hindley Earnshaw drinks himself to death for grief at losing his consumptive wife; Hareton loves to the end the man who has usurped his place, degraded him, fed him on blows and exaction: and it is constancy in absence that embitters and sickens the younger Catharine. Even Isabella Heathcliff, weak as she is, is not fickle. Even Lintort Heathcliff, who, of all the characters in fiction, may share with Barnes Newcome the bad eminence of supreme unlovableness, even he loves his mother and Catharine, and, in his selfish way, loves them to the end.

The years passed, nothing happened, save that Hindley Earnshaw died, and Heathcliff—to whom every yard had been mortgaged, took possession of the place; Hareton, who should have been the first gentleman in the neighbourhood, "being reduced to a state of complete dependence on his father's inveterate enemy, lives as a servant in his own house, deprived of the advantages of wages quite unable to right himself because of his friendlessnes, and his ignorance that he has been wronged."

The eventless years went by till Catharine was thirteen, when Mrs. Heathcliff died, and Edgar went to the South of England to fetch her son. Little Cathy, during her father's absence, grew impatient of her confinement to the park; there was no one to escort her over the moors, so one day she leapt the fence, got lost, and was finally sheltered at Wuthering Heights, of which place and of all its inmates she had been kept in total ignorance. She promised to keep the visit a secret from her father, lest he should dismiss Ellen Dean. She was very indignant at being told that rudely-bred Hareton was her cousin; and when that night Linton—delicate, pretty, pettish Linton—arrived, she infinitely preferred his cousinship.

The next morning she found Linton gone, his father