“Yes, Richard, mon cher,” she said to her nephew, as she bade him good-night, “my headache has left me; I felt quite vaporish this afternoon. Your friend is a dear creature, so droll and refreshing; not polished, of course, but quite charming. I have fallen in love with the dear bear, Richard. It is so delightful to talk to a man of sense and humor, even though he may smell—faintly, of the soil.” * * * * * Bess had wandered back from Beacon Rock through her well-loved woods that morning, thinking more of Richard Jeffray than was good for a woman’s heart. There was a charm about Bess that no mortal could gainsay. She looked fit for carrying a milking-pail over meadows golden with cowslips, for playing the Miss Prue gathering rosemary and thyme in some red-walled garden, or walking in brocade and lace amid the close-clipped yews, statues, and terrace ways of some stately manor. Despite her strength and her brilliant vitality she was no hoyden, and even in her wild beauty seemed to suggest the subtle delicacy of high birth. Richard himself had been puzzled by her quaint stateliness, such stateliness as a child might have inherited from a noble mother and treasured unconsciously as she grew to womanhood. The thoughts uppermost in Bess’s mind that morning dealt with the worldly gulf between Jeffray and herself. The girl had been content hitherto with the forest life, content to accept old Ursula as her foster-mother and the rest of them as her kinsfolk. She had grown up with Dan and David, and the forest children, ignorant as they were of the great world beyond the shadows of Pevensel. Yet beyond the forest life a dim and forgotten past seemed to rise up in the blue distance of the mind. A few strange incidents, which she had never been able to explain, still lived on like relics of a vanished age. She had prattled of them to old Ursula as a child, and had been laughed at and chided for her pains. The old woman had always told her that Rachel, her mother, Ursula’s younger sister, had run away from the hamlet before Bess was born, and that when her mother had died—“down in the west”—a peddler man had brought Bess back to the Grimshaws of Pevensel. Ursula had always shed a species of reticent mystery over the past, and had waxed dour if Bess had pressed her questions too boldly or too far.