To Marion in her childhood it had not been without appalling associations, for besides whispers of a heretic or two burnt to death at its base, there was a more ghastly legend of a modern Sapphira struck dead on the spot by what some good people used to call “a special dispensation of providence,” as an awful warning to succeeding generations. Marion’s nurse told her this pretty little story one day when the perfectly truthful child persisted in refusing to confess to a sin she had not committed; but it had an opposite effect to that anticipated. “If, then, I say I broke the jug, nurse, when I know I did not, God would perhaps kill me like the woman. Which way of putting it was rather beyond the nurse’s logical powers. Fortunately the real delinquent was afterwards discovered, and the little girl came off with flying colours! As the fly stopped at the door of the Cross House, Geoffrey’s bright face appeared. He rang the bell, and notwithstanding the forbidding frowns of the prim, crabbed looking maid-servant, who answered the summons, stood his ground bravely, and carried out his intention of assisting at the first meeting of aunt and niece. They were almost strangers to each other, for the years during which they had not met had changed the girl from a child to a woman, and had nearly effaced from her recollection the personal appearance of her aunt, who had done little to attract of attach her young relative to herself. Marion and Mr. Baldwin were shown into a room at the back of the house, on the first floor. A pleasant bright room it might have been, had its owner been a pleasant or bright person, for it looked out on an old-fashioned walled-in garden, which too, might easily have been rendered pretty and attractive, instead of formal and bare. An untidy, neglected garden is an unpleasant sight, but hardly less so to my mind is a faultlessly neat one, if stiff, ungraceful and prim—the one might quite as justly as the other be described as “uncared for.” No person who cares for a garden as it should be cared for, would be content with doling out to it the minimum of unlovely, unloving attention, necessary to keeping it merely in order—that particular kind of lifeless, stunted order which is one of the ugliest things I know.