She had experienced trouble, but only such trouble as comes with the morning, the clouds and mists whereof vanish under the beams of the mid-day sun. Of that different sorrow which falls on humanity when the darkness of evening is closing upon man’s onward course, when there is no noonday to follow, and only the night left in which to travel darkly, her life held no knowledge. She was like Berrie Down Hollow, sweet, natural, unaffected; and Berrie Down would have seemed strange without her, while she might, at a first introduction, scarcely have seemed so entirely in keeping with any place away from Berrie Down. She was the sun of that house, at any rate;—even Arthur knew things were “never the same” when she went visiting; and, at the moment I ask you to look out on the view from the drawing-room windows of Berrie Down Hollow, you may see the Squire seated under the shade of a chestnut-tree, reading the _Times_, and inwardly chafing over his wife’s absence, and wondering whether, for certain, she will return from London that evening, and bring Mrs. Ormson with her. Mr. Dudley likes Mrs. Ormson, and he does not much like her daughter Bessie, an exceedingly pretty girl, who sits on the turf at his feet, spelling the other side of the sheet, resting her round cheek on her hand the while. All the young Dudleys, his brothers and sisters, his own son and his own daughter, were harmless in comparison to Bessie Ormson, who had a will of her own which she asserted, and opinions of her own which she stuck to, and who was staying at Berrie Down for a couple of months, as though, Squire Dudley remarked to his wife, “the house had not enough people in it without her.” CHAPTER III. THE FAMILY HISTORY. If Berrie Down “had enough people in it without Miss Ormson,” Squire Dudley could scarcely in common justice lay the blame at any other door than his own, considering that of his own free will he had at a comparatively early period of his and their lives encumbered himself with the maintenance of five half-brothers and sisters, which fact it was impossible either for him or them to forget, seeing never a day passed that he did not rehearse to some one how this charge had crippled and kept him back in life. “Other men,” he declared, “found it hard enough to maintain wife and family of their own; but here was he, provided by his own father with a family large enough to drag down any man.” “It is a comfort your step-mother married, at all events, Arthur,” observed Miss Ormson, “or you would have been in the workhouse long ago. The last straw, is it not so? you dear grumbling old camel.” And that was all the sympathy _he_ got. Can it be wondered at, therefore, if Squire Dudley thought every man’s hand was raised against him?