‘No, dear, no; I have plenty for us all,’ returned her sister hastily, as she paid for three places in the dress circle, and conducted her relations to their destination. Here, seated well out of observation of the stalls, as she thought, Miss Llewellyn felt free for the next two hours at least, to remain quiet and think, an operation for which she had had no time since her sister had burst in so unexpectedly upon her. William and Hetty had naturally no eyes except for the play, the like of which they had never seen before. They followed the sensational incidents of one of Sim’s and Buchanan’s melodramas with absorbing interest. The varied scenes; the clap-trap changes; the pretty dresses, all chained them, eyes and ears, to the stage, whilst an occasional breathless exclamation from Hetty, of ‘Oh, Nell, isn’t that beautiful?’ was all the demand they made upon her attention. She had seen the piece before, and if she had not done so, she had no heart to attend to it now. Her memories of home, and the old life she had led there, had all been awakened by the sight of her sister and the manner she had spoken of it; and while Hetty was engrossed by the novel scenes before her, Miss Llewellyn was in fancy back again at Panty-cuckoo Farm, where she had been born and bred. She was wandering down the steep path which led to the farmhouse, bordered on either side by whitened stones to enable the drivers to keep to it in the dark, and which had given the dear old place its fanciful name of ‘The Cuckoo’s Dell.’ She could see the orchard of apple and pear trees, which grew around the house itself, and under which the pigs were digging with their black snouts for such succulent roots as their swinish souls loved. She sat well back in her seat listening to the notes of the cuckoo from the neighbouring thicket, and the woods that skirted the domains of General Sir Archibald Bowmant, who was the principal landowner for many miles around Usk at that period. What a marvellous, magnificent place she had thought the General’s house once, when she had been admitted to view the principal rooms, by especial favour of the housekeeper. And now--why, they were nothing compared to Lord Ilfracombe’s, the man whom little Hetty had called her ‘master.’ ‘And a very good name for him, too,’ thought Miss Llewellyn, as she finished her musings, ‘for he is my master, body and soul.’ CHAPTER II.