"Of course she does," responded Elsie, with a kiss. "They are perfectly beautiful flowers, and no one else could have arranged them so well. Flowers suit me ever so much better than jewels, Mrs. Lennard." "Yes, my dear. But where are your mother's diamonds?" "I have not got them," Elsie answered quietly. "I saw Bertha wearing them just before my father died. Don't be vexed, dearest Mrs. Lennard." But the old lady was vexed; a flush mounted to the roots of her silver hair, and her foot beat upon the carpet. "Then I suppose some of Robert's creditors have got them now," she said angrily. "Bertha deserves all that she has had to bear. It is just chastisement. I wonder that you can take your wrongs so patiently!" Elsie turned to her gently, with a wonderfully sweet look in her brown eyes. "I was not patient at first," she answered. "There was a battle to fight. Afterwards, Meta helped me." "Meta?" repeated Mrs. Lennard in a puzzled tone. "Ah, you mean the lady who was engaged to Harold Waring. How did she help you, my dear?" "I think it was the touch of her vanished hand that calmed me," Elsie said in a hushed tone. "Like Hamlet, 'I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious;' I was glad at first when I heard of Bertha's humiliation. And then I read Meta's story in her manuscript, and knew that she had suffered more than I, and had forgiven." She stood quite still a moment, a graceful figure enfolded in golden light, with an exalted look on her face. "Elsie," Mrs. Lennard said suddenly, "you are a beautiful woman. You are like some one in a poem, child! There is a certain kind of beauty that only comes through pain." Elsie smiled at her, and began to fasten the flowers in her bodice. They gave the finishing touch to her dress, and suited her, as she had said, better than jewels. There was an ancient bridge across the moat which divided the Court from the highway. The water lay still and shining under the broad lily leaves, and the grey walls of the old house stood bathed in the enchanted light. It was an evening that made you think of legend and song, of knights riding home across the bridge when the fight was over, of ladies watching from those windows high for the first glimpse of streaming pennon and waving plume. The old house stood fair and stately in the sunset, with all its oriel windows and pointed gables and gilded vanes. As Elsie went up the grey stone steps of the terrace she had that curious feeling which Rossetti has called "sudden light"-- "I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell." Nothing seemed unfamiliar; the dense walls of box and yew showing dark against a saffron sky, the half-defaced knightly figure above the great portico, the tiled floor of the hall, where a few white rose-petals were scattered.