An hour later Mrs. Budd and Evan were waiting on the steps of the main entrance to see her start. Presently, mounted on her mare Peggy, and followed by John Dyce, also on horseback, she came riding round from the stables, and a very fair and gracious picture she made in her long dark-blue riding habit, over which she wore a short gray cloak lined with black and tied with black ribbons, being in mourning for Mr. Cortelyon. Her hat was of black beaver, broad-brimmed and ornamented with two sweeping ostrich plumes of the same color. The afternoon sun, shining upon three or four heavy ringlets of chestnut hair which had escaped from under her hat, made a golden glory of them. The late pallor of her complexion had given place to a lovely flush of color. Her eyes, while more than ordinarily brilliant, did not smile as her lips did; rather did it seem as if they were charged with the light of some great resolution which might need all her courage to carry it through. Evan was held aloft for the sake of a last kiss. There was a fervent "Heaven keep you, darling!" a flickering smile, the glisten of a tear, a last wave of the hand, and Nell was gone. The widow and child stood hand in hand till the trees of the avenue hid her from view and the sound of hoof-beats had died into silence. Then they went back indoors, but for both the light and gladness of the house had vanished. There was a chill upon everything, their spirits included. An hour-and-a-half's good riding brought Miss Baynard and her escort to the quaint old town of Lanchester, with its narrow streets and narrower alleyways, with its many overhanging, lopsided houses, and its grim old county jail, built of ragged graystone, which frowns blankly down from the upper end of its wide, irregularly-shaped market-place, as if in mute warning to all and sundry. Miss Baynard, whose road led her past one corner of it, shuddered involuntarily as she glanced at it out of a corner of her eye. For her just then that gray old pile was the most vitally interesting spot in the whole world. She was bound, first of all, for Langrig, the seat of Sir James Dalrymple, which was situated in the suburbs of Lanchester. Sir James, it may be remembered, was one of the trustees appointed under Mr. Cortelyon's unsigned will, and very glad he was, when he came to learn the contents of that document, to find that it was so much waste paper, and that he would not be called upon to help in the carrying out of what he regarded as its most wicked and unjust provisions. He had a warm regard for Nell, not only for her own sake, but for that of her father, whom he had known and liked, and with whom he had spent many a roystering evening when they were young blades together about London town. Finally, it may be mentioned that Sir James was chairman of the Lanchester bench of magistrates.