She smiled at herself for asking this question, as she was not likely to recognize any name Mrs. Bick might mention; but the answer had an unexpected interest of its own. “He’s a Mr. Ayl----something--Ayling or Aylwinne; yes, that’s it--Aylwinne. He’s a very rich Ingyman, and a friend o’ Mr. Lumley’s at the little church in the village just beyond. He’s a dark-faced gentleman, with a beard as thick and as dark as I dunno what, and such a pair of eyes! You’ve seen him, ain’t ye?” “When?” asked Florence, rather confusedly. “Why, a-riding by on a big brown horse. I ha’ seen him two or three times when I’ve been pottering about here among Dannle’s flowers; an’ he always looks and looks at one as he goes by just as though he wanted to speak and didn’t like. I guessed as this was the Ingyman as soon as they began talking about him in the shop where I went for my tea and sugar.” Leaving Mrs. Bick still resting at the gate, Florence strolled along the path, musing as she went on the curious circumstance of this stranger taking up his residence in the neighborhood of her own. It seemed as if it were their fate to encounter each other. At all events, she might reasonably expect to see him frequently, for the church near Orwell Court was the one she regularly attended, in preference to the more crowded one in Kirton, partly because the walk to it was through pleasant, shady lanes, and by the side of a little river, and partly because she liked the clergyman--a quiet, earnest man, who had called frequently on Mr. Heriton, and testified a friendly interest in him. As Florence drew near the silent figures in the porch, a cloud swept over the moon, and the rising wind sighed so mournfully that a shiver crept through her frame. Laying her hand on her father’s arm, she said: “It grows cold, papa, dear. Will you not come in?” He neither moved nor replied, but continued to sit as before, leaning forward, and apparently gazing intently at old Daniel, whose pipe had dropped from his hand, and whose head had fallen back against the trelliswork that supported the honeysuckle growing over it. Startled, she scarce knew why, Florence also leaned forward, and, the moon just then emerging from the shadowing cloud, she saw the old man’s features distinctly. It was the face of the dead! Without sign or struggle, Daniel Bick’s life had passed away, and the unconscious partner of its joys and sorrows was a widow. Florence’s first impulse was to shriek for help; her next, to try and arouse her father, whose strange immobility added to her terror. “Come away, papa--come away! We must break the news gently to the poor wife. Papa, do you not hear me? Speak--pray speak!”