A gloomy, disreputable gateway, affording admittance up a narrow cart-road into a wider court-yard beyond, one side of which was occupied by a packing-shed and a carpenter’s shop; another by the weaving factory, and a third by the dwelling of the manager; the only picturesque things about the place being the windlass and buckets belonging to a disused well. We must pass in, if you please, for Arthur Dudley is the manager, and this is his house. There are high walls all round the court-yard; high walls blackened with smoke, unrelieved by tree, or ivy, or climbing Virginian creeper. Heather is planning to cover them with greenery, but her attempts have hitherto proved abortive; the shrubs all die like the plants in her ghostly, little garden, where she can get nothing but double red daisies and stocks and pinks to grow. A change this from Berrie Down, you say! Certainly; but life is full of changes, and Arthur Dudley has still much to learn. The world’s educational establishments are not always pleasant places at which to reside; the playgrounds are oftentimes contracted, and the diet not suited to delicate palates; but the lessons taught in those seminaries of practical learning prove oftentimes much more useful than the pleasant tasks conned beside the singing river, under the rustling trees. As for Heather, there is no life perfect; yet it may be doubted whether she was very unhappy in those days of pecuniary struggle, of pinching economy. The high walls which seemed to be closing her in were, perhaps, the most active trouble of her life. Sometimes she felt as if she were in a prison, as if she were a thousand miles from every one, as if she should die for want of air, as though, if a fire were to break out, she should never reach the gates alive. At all of which fancies Arthur laughed, and then Heather laughed; and then the two, in the summer evenings, would water their tiny bit of garden-ground, and talk about the far-away country, which it almost seemed as though they were never to behold again. Entirely owing to Arthur’s pride. Heather could not blind herself to this fact, although she sedulously refrained from touching upon it. When Berrie Down was sold, the gentleman who bought it offered Arthur two hundred and fifty pounds a year and a free house, if he would take the management of the farm, but Arthur refused.