It was a very pretty, if somewhat fantastically built cottage, which had been erected for an ornamental lodge at the entrance of a fine estate, the property of an old but impoverished family, which had been brought to the hammer, and sold in separate portions. The house itself--a fine old place, built in one of the Tudor reigns--stood on an eminence some two miles distant, and had been taken on lease by some benevolent lady, for the purpose of making a Home for girls who had suffered imprisonment, with a view to prevent their further degradation. Our cottage was situated just out of the village, which lay in the hollow at the foot of the hill, on the side of which stood the house which I have mentioned as being visible from one part of the Fairview grounds, and which I so coveted for my married life with Philip. A little to the left, at the back of our cottage, still stood a portion of the fine old woods as they had been for many a generation of the A---- family. The land on the other side of what had once been the avenue, had been turned into hop-fields and so forth. In front of the cottage, the space had been so much encroached upon that what had once been a fine private road was now but a narrow lane. Branching from that lane, on the right was the village, and on the left another lane leading to a field, through which there was a right of way to the railway station; and from the stile of that field ran two paths, the lane I have mentioned passing the cottage and on to the village; and another lane at right angles with it, leading through the woods. There was some little talk of _my_ house soon being in the market, said the work-people, to whom I was curious enough to put a few questions about it. The lease was expiring, it seemed, and the present residents did not intend to renew it. This was news indeed. If, by good fortune, Philip arrived in time to secure it, how delightful it would be; the two others I most cared for in the world living so near us! How delightful to be able to shew my appreciation of the kindness I had received in some better way than by words! Then I pleased myself with another pretty picture of the future, in which Lilian and Robert Wentworth were the principal figures. That Lilian would very long remain as depressed as she now was, I did not believe; her mind was a too healthy one for that. Indeed the reaction had already set in. After the first shock was got over, she was, I think, not a little astonished at the comparatively small amount of regret she suffered on account of the loss of her lover. It might be that she was beginning to realise the fact that her love for him had never really been what she had imagined it. In one point she was mistaken. She believed that he also had deceived himself, and was firmly persuaded that he did not love her and never had.