“What is all this?” I asked, as I stepped over oil-cloth, and hearth-rug, and curtains. “Who is going to live here?” “A Mrs. Rogers, cousin to the new madame’s waiting-maid,” Perry replied, with a certain intonation in his voice, which showed me that he had taken his cue from the house on the Hill, and was not inclined to regard with favor the cousin of “madame’s waiting-maid.” “When is Mrs. Rogers expected?” I asked, and he replied: “She may come any time, but the colonel will not be here for two weeks or more. There’s the old Harry to pay up there,” and he nodded toward the house on the Hill. “I tell you, Miss Rossiter and Miss Schuyler is ridin’ their highest horses.” It was not for me to question him, and so I made him no reply, but improved the opportunity of going through the house where my old friend, Heloise Fordham, used to live, and where I had bidden her good-by with promises to care for that grave on the hillside. And I had cared for it regularly at first, and then as years went by and she neither came to see my work nor sent me any word, I gradually began to grow a little lax in my labors, and now it was months since I had thought of it. But I remembered it that morning when I stood in Heloise’s old room, where I had seen her with the tears in her eyes and the tremor in her voice as she talked to me of Abelard, who “was not her beau,” and yet very dear to her. There by the window she had stood and cut the long curl of hair and given me the vase for Abelard’s grave. “And where is the young girl?” I asked myself, “and why has she never written me a line in all these years?” Then as I thought of the neglected grave, I said, aloud: “I’ll go there to-morrow and see what I can do. It must be sadly overgrown by this time.” But it rained the next day and the next, and so I did not go, but came each day by the cottage, where at last I saw the new tenants, Mrs. Rogers and little Gertie Westbrooke. The child was in the garden close by the fence, and glanced up at me with a look which made me stop instantly to gaze at her, while the smile which broke over her face and shone in her blue eyes took me straight through the gate to her side, and before I knew at all what I was doing or why I was doing it, I was talking to her and seeming to myself like one who walks in a dream and sees there things which he has known and seen before. Surely that smile, which came and went so frequently, and that voice so clear, and sweet, and ringing, were familiar to me, and I said to the child: “Have you been here before?” “No, ma’am; I was born in London. I never was in America until now, and yet it’s funny that this place seems like home, and my room is just what I thought it would be. Won’t you walk in, please, and see auntie?” she said, and I followed her into the cottage, where she presented me to the woman there with all the air and grace of one born to the purple. “Auntie, Mrs. Rogers; this lady is,—I don’t believe I know your name.”