CARAMEL COTTAGE I.--EDGAR RESTE I It was early in August, and we were at Dyke Manor, for the Squire had let us go home from school for the Worcester races. We had joined him at Worcester the previous day, Tuesday, driving home with him in the evening. To-morrow, Thursday, he would drive us over to the course again; to-day, Wednesday, the horses would have rest; and on Friday we must return to school. Breakfast was over, the Squire gone out, and the few minutes' Bible-reading to us--which Mrs. Todhetley never forgot, though Tod did not always stay in for it, but he did this morning--came to an end. Hannah appeared at the door as she closed the Book. "Miss Barbary's come, ma'am," she said. "Run, my dear," cried Mrs. Todhetley to Lena. "I don't want to," said Lena, running to the open window instead, and nearly pitching head-foremost through it: upon which Hannah captured her and carried her off. "Who on earth is Miss Barbary?" questioned Tod. "Any relation to the man at Caramel Cottage?" "His daughter," said Mrs. Todhetley. "She comes to teach Lena French." "Hope she's less of a shady character than her father!" was Tod's free comment. A year or two before this, a stranger had made his appearance at Church Dykely, and put up at the Silver Bear. He was a gentlemanly-looking man of perhaps forty years, tall, slender, agile, with thin, distinguished features, an olive skin, black hair, and eyes of a peculiar shade of deep steel-blue. People went into raptures over his face, and called it beautiful. And so it was; but to my thinking it had a look in it that was the opposite of beautiful; any way, the opposite of good. They said it was my fancy at home: but Duffham owned to the same fancy. His name, as he wrote it down one day at the Silver Bear, was Pointz Barbary. After a week's stay at the inn, he, finding, I suppose, that the neighbourhood suited him, looked out for a little place to settle down upon, and met with it in Caramel Cottage, a small dwelling near to us, on the property called Caramel's Farm. The cottage was then to be let, and Mr. Barbary went into it. Some items of his past history came out by degrees; it is hard to say how, for he told none himself. Now and then some former friend or other came to pay him a short visit; and it may be that these strangers talked about him.