"The styles are quite distinct; you could not possibly compare them," Addie retorts more grandly still. "I am going up to the grove now to read 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' I believe it's beautiful." "Don't you think, my dear niece, you had better mend that hole in your stocking, just above the heel, first?" interposes Miss Darcy gently. "It has been in that yawning condition for the last two days; and, to say the least of it, it scarcely looks ladylike." "I noticed it when I was dressing," assents Addie, placidly, "but quite forgot about it afterward. Who'll lend me a thimble and a needle and some cotton?" CHAPTER II. "Three hundred years, isn't it, Addie, since the Lefroys first settled at Nutsgrove?" "Three hundred years," repeats Addie automatically. "Since the year of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, A.D., 1572, when Tristran le Froi, Sieur de Beaulieu, fled from his patrimonial estates in Anjou to England, where he settled at Nutsgrove, and married, in 1574, Adelaide Marion, daughter and heiress of Sir Robert Tisdale of Flockton, by whom he had issue, three sons and two daughters--Stephen, Robert, Tristran, who--" "Three hundred years!" repeats Robert, with fierce bitterness, a lurid light gleaming in his eyes. "What right had he to treat me like that? He got it from his father, who got it from his, and so on backward from son to father for generations. Why should I be made to suffer for his iniquity? Why should I lose what he inherited in solemn trust for his son or next of kin? It is infamous, it is monstrous! I suppose it would be wrong to wish that one's own father--" "Oh, hush, Robert--hush!" Addie's hand is placed over the boy's quivering mouth; he is silenced. Eight months have gone by, and the great evil foreseen by poor Aunt Jo has come to pass. Colonel Lefroy, out of reach of remonstrance or appeal, has let the old home of his forefathers pass out of his hands and his son's forever. The Jews have seized on the estate, evicted its nominal possessors, sold by public auction the goods and chattels, the pictures, china, plate, moldy tapestries, tattered carpets, curtains, scratched and time stained Chippendale; even the worthless relics of their nursery-days the homeless wretched children have not been allowed to take with them. The house and immediately surrounding land, after some brisk competition, has been purchased by Tom Armstrong, the great manufacturer, owner of some half-dozen of the most unsavory chimneys in Kelvick, which at times, when the wind is blowing due south, carry their noxious effluvia over the dewy acres of Nutsgrove and the surrounding estates, and most unpleasantly tickle the noses of aristocratic county proprietors, who have nothing in common with the busy plebeian heart of commerce and inventive industry throbbing in the very center of their pastures.