Chapter XVIII — Wuthering Heights

Twelve years after Catherine's death, Nelly calls this the happiest time of her life. Young Cathy grows like a larch, lovely and quick-witted under Edgar's teaching, saucy with I shall tell papa yet gentle in temper. Till thirteen she never leaves the park alone; Wuthering Heights does not exist for her. She longs for Penistone Crags and the Fairy Cave, but the road runs by the Heights and Edgar always answers, not yet, love.

Isabella writes that she is dying and begs Edgar to fetch Linton. Away three weeks, he forbids Cathy to wander even with Nelly. She plays Arabian merchant, sends her pony over the lowest hedge, and vanishes till tea. Nelly hears it from a labourer, finds Charlie bleeding at the farmhouse, and enters to see Cathy at home with Hareton, eighteen, laughing by the fire.

He showed her the Fairy Cave until she treated him as a servant; told he is her cousin, Hareton curses her and Cathy weeps at a clown kin while London holds her gentle cousin. Nelly drags her home, secures a pledge of silence, and pictures Hareton untaught, ruined by Heathcliff and Joseph, in a gloomy house no longer Hindley's riotous den.

Cathy's pledge buys a few more years of innocence, but one leap over the hedge proves Edgar's sheltered park cannot keep the second generation from the Heights. She has met kin she despises and language the Grange never taught, and the wall that held for twelve years has already failed.