I stood long at the window, for I knew this glory was transient and before another snowfall every crimson and yellow leaf would have fallen. While dressing, I took myself to task for the mood of the night before. Such thoughts could not serve me in my service to others. I was a beneficiary--Mrs. Macleod's word--as well as Jamie and his mother, and I determined to make the most of my benefits which, in the morning sunshine, seemed many and great. Had I not health, a sheltering room, abundant food and good wages? I could not help wondering whose was the money with which I was to be paid. Had it anything to do with Doctor Rugvie's "conscience fund"? Did Mrs. Macleod and Jamie bear the expense? Or was it Mr. Ewart's? "Ewart--Ewart," I said to myself; "why it's the very same I heard in the train." Then and there I made my decision: I would write to Delia Beaseley that, as Mrs. Macleod said Doctor Rugvie would be here sometime later on in the winter, I would wait until I should have seen him before asking him for my papers. "I shall ask her never to mention my name to him in connection with what happened twenty-six years ago; I prefer to tell it myself," was my thought; "it is an affair of my own life, and it belongs to me, and to no other, to act as pioneer into this part of my experience--" Marie's rap and entrance with hot water, her voluble surprise at finding me up and dressed, and our efforts to understand each other, diverted my thoughts. I made out that the family breakfasted an hour later, and that it was Marie's duty to make a fire for me every morning. I felt almost like apologizing to her for allowing her to do it for me, who am able-bodied and not accustomed to be waited on. I took rain-coat and rubbers, and followed her down stairs. She unbolted the great front door and let me out into the early morning sunshine. I stood on the upper step to look around me, to take in every detail of my surroundings, only guessed at the night before. Maples and birch mingled with evergreens, crowding close to the house, filled the foreground on each side. In front, an unkempt driveway curved across a large neglected lawn, set with lindens and pines, and lost itself in woods at the left. Between the tree trunks on the lawn, at a distance of perhaps five hundred feet, I saw the broad gleaming waters of the St. Lawrence broken by two long islands. Behind the farther one I saw the smoke of some large steamer. I looked up at the house. It was a storey and a half, long, low, white. The three large windows on each side of the entrance were provided with ponderous wooden shutters banded with iron. There were four dormers in the gently sloping roof and two large central chimneys, besides two or three smaller ones in various parts of the roof. Such was the old manor of Lamoral.