Amid the apple bowers of the land of cider, and near a beautiful little bay into which the waters of the British Channel rippled, stood the pretty and secluded cottage he occupied, as 'Major MacIan,' with his son and a nephew. The wooded hills around it were not all covered with orchards, however, and the little road that wound round the bay ran under eminences that, from their aspect, might make a tourist think he was skirting a Swiss lake. Others were heath-clad and fringed at the base by a margin of grey rocks. Into the bay flowed a stream, blue and transparent always. Here salmon trout were often found, and the young men spent hours at its estuary angling for rock fish. A Devonshire cottage is said by Mrs. Bray to be 'the sweetest object that the poet, the artist, or the lover of the romantic could desire to see,' and such a cottage was that of Major MacIan, the name now adopted by Lennard--that of Flora's father--in fulfilment of the vow he had made to renounce the name, title, and existence of his family. Around it, and in front sloping down to the bay, was a beautiful garden, teeming with the flowers and fruits of Devonshire. On three sides was a rustic verandah, the trellis work of which was covered by a woven clematis, sweetbriar, and Virginia creeper, which, in the first year of her residence there, Flora's pretty hands, cased in garden gloves, were never tired of tending; and now the Virginia creeper, with its luxuriant tendrils, emerald green in summer, russet and red in autumn, grew in heavy masses over the roof and around the chimney stalks, making it, as Flora was wont to say exultingly, 'quite a love of a place!' On one hand lay the rolling waters of the Channel, foaming about the Mewstone Rock; on the other, a peep was given amid the coppice of the ancient church of Revelstoke, and here the married pair lived happily and alone for a brief time. Save for the advent of a ship passing in sight of the little bay, it was a sleepy place in which Lennard, now retired as a major, had 'pitched his tent,' as he said--the Cottage of Revelstoke. Even in these railway times people thereabout were content with yesterday's news. There was no gas to spoil the complexions of the young, and no water rates to 'worrit' the old; and telegrams never came, in their orange-tinted envelopes, to startle the hearts of the feeble and the sickly. No monetary transactions having taken place, and no correspondence being necessary, between Lennard and his family or their legal agent, Mr. Kippilaw, for more than twenty years now, he had quite passed away from their knowledge, and almost from their memory; and many who knew them once cared not, perhaps, whether he or his wife were in the land of the living.