‘Well, I did not leave a very definite account of myself, certainly. You see I was so tired of Stillmington and of my pupils; and thanks to concert-singing and pupils, I had contrived to save a little money. So, as my health was not quite so good as it might be—I had been working rather hard for the last few years, you see—I thought I would give myself a month or so of thorough rest. I had a fancy—amounting almost to an irresistible longing—to see my old home once more—the graves of those dear ones my ingratitude had wronged. I knew that to come back to the scenes of my girlhood would be the keenest suffering, yet I longed to come. I did not want to be very near Wykhamston, as that would be to run the risk of recognition; but I wished to be somewhere within the reach of the dear, dear old place. I thought of this village and of Sally, my kind old nurse, who came to live here in this cottage, which she had bought with her savings, when she left the Rectory. I was only fourteen when she left us; and one of our greatest treats—Lucius’s and mine and the dear sister we lost—was to come here of a summer afternoon and drink tea with dear old Sally. So I said to myself, “If God has spared my old nurse, I will go and ask her to give me a lodging;” and Flossie and I came straight here—to this out-of-the-way corner—to take our holiday. Flossie has been enraptured with the rustic life, the pigs and fowls, and the old gray donkey on the green, with whom she has formed quite a friendship. She feeds him with bread-and-milk every morning, foolish child!’ She said this with the mother’s tender look at the fair-haired damsel, who disposed of the bread-and-honey as fast as if she had laid a wager with Geoffrey as to which of them should devour most. ‘And have you been happy here?’ asked Geoffrey. ‘Yes—after the first bitter pain of seeing my lost home, and remembering how I lost it. I have been happier than I had hoped ever to be again. After all, there is some magic in one’s native air.’ ‘Yes,’ exclaimed Geoffrey, with an air of conviction, ‘of course there is. I have a place in Hampshire myself, not a stone’s-throw, in a rural point of view—that is to say, five-and-twenty miles or so—from here. No end of arable and meadow-land, and copse and rabbit-warren, and some well-wooded ground about the house, which my father took the liberty to call a park; and a nice old house enough, of the Queen-Anne period; stiffish and squarish and reddish, but by no means a bad kind of barrack. I’ll give the sugar-broker notice—no, I can’t do that—I’ll offer to buy back his lease to-morrow.’ ‘The sugar-broker!’ repeated Janet, perplexed.