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Rh Another gay three months followed, seeing old friends and making new ones.

In December the travellers were back again in London, but several more visits were paid before they returned to Ireland. Thus, they halted at Clifton, to see Miss Edgeworth's sister Emmeline who was married there, and stayed at Bowood, Easton Grey, Badminton, and various other houses, in all of which they met with a warm welcome. Beloved Aunt Buxton, too, had to be seen on the way home. It was March before the sisters reached Edgeworthstown, after not quite a year's absence, a year that seemed to Miss Edgeworth like a delightful dream, full of Alps and glaciers and cascades, and Mont Blanc, and "troops of acquaintances in splendid succession and visionary confusion," a dream of which the sober certainty of happiness remained, assuring her that all that had passed had been no dream but a reality.