The Row at that hot hour being forsaken, instead of crossing the park to seek her favourite resting-place, she turned into the fresh shade of the elms growing near its northern unfashionable side. She walked on until the fountains were passed and she was in the deeper shade of Kensington Gardens. She was standing on the very spot where she had watched three ragged little children playing together, heaping up the old dead brown leaves. The image of the little girl struggling up from the heap in which her rude playfellows had thrown her, with tearful dusty face, and dead leaves clinging to her clothes and disordered hair, made Fan laugh, and then in a moment she could scarcely keep back the tears. For now a hundred sweet memories rushed into her heart--her walks in the Gardens, all the little incidents, the early blissful days when she lived with Mary; and so vividly was the past seen and realised, yet so immeasurably far did it seem to her and so irrecoverably lost, that the sweetness was overmastered by the pain, and the pain was like anguish. And yet with that feeling in her heart, so strong that it made her cheeks pallid and her steps languid, she went on to visit every spot associated in her mind with some memory of that lost time. Under that very tree, one chill October day, she had given charity unasked to a pale-faced man, shivering in thin clothes; and there too she had comforted a poor wild-haired little boy whose stronger companions had robbed him of all the chestnut-burs and acorns he had gathered; and on this sacred spot a small angelic child walking with its mamma had put up its arms and demanded a kiss. Even the Albert Memorial was not overlooked, but she went not there to admire the splendour of colour and gold, and the procession of marble men of all ages and all lands, led by old Homer playing on his lyre. She looked only on the colossal woman seated on her elephant, ever gazing straight before her, shading her eyes from the hot Asiatic sun with her hand, for that majestic face of marble, and the proud beautiful mouth that reminded her of Mary, had also memories for her. And at last her rambles brought her to the extreme end of the Gardens, to the once secluded grove between Kensington Palace and Bayswater Hill; for even that bitter spot among the yew and pine-trees must be visited now. She found the very seat where she had rested on that unhappy day in early spring, shortly after her adventure at Twickenham, when, as she then imagined, her beloved friend and protector had so cruelly betrayed and abandoned her. How desolate and heart-broken she had felt, seated there alone on that morning in early spring, in that green dress which Mary had given her--how she had sobbed there by herself, abandoned, unloved, alone in the world! And after all Mary had done her no wrong, and Mary herself had found her in that lonely place! The whole scene of their meeting rose with a painful distinctness before her mind.