“Indeed I would,” she cried with joy, “for there are great wide rooms to play in and here are only four walls and a smoky chimney.” Mother Jeanne reproached her severely for this criticism of their dwelling but Stephen, laughing, insisted that she was right and that the change must be made at once. But when next day Mother Jeanne and Clotilde gathered up their few possessions and carried them to the big house, they found the master gone again and for several months they saw his face no more. He went and came much in the years that followed so that he and Clotilde caught only fleeting glimpses of each other, yet learned, for all that, to be close friends. Sometimes he found her racing about the garden walks with her boon companion, Miles Atherton, a sturdy, slow-spoken lad of Hopewell, sometimes he found her going about her work in the big house, for she was nimble-fingered and industrious and began early to be a great help to her dear Mère Jeanne. There was one cosy winter evening when she sat on his knee before the blazing fire and heard the tale of King James’ Tree and of Sergeant Branderby and learned how his two great pistols came to hang above the chimney-piece. Upon another occasion, a warm summer morning when the linden tree was in bloom, he and she and Miles Atherton sat upon the bench in the Queen’s Garden while Stephen told the two eager children the story of Master Simon and Queen Elizabeth, and of how Margeret Radpath and Roger Bardwell had, on that very spot, witnessed the French priest’s forbidden mass. Stephen told them too, one rainy day as they sat in his study, of Jeremiah Macrae and his still unfulfilled prophecy of the destruction of the garden. He even got down the great family Bible and turned the pages to find that same picture that had struck terror to the heart of little Margeret Radpath, the figure of one of the prophets of old, standing by the city gate and crying forth a warning of the ruin and desolation that would come to the land. The tale laid such hold upon Clotilde’s imagination that she dreamed that night of the ominous Master Macrae and thought for many a day thereafter of what he had foretold. So dearly did she love Master Simon’s garden and all that grew in it, that the very thought of harm coming to that dear place was more than she could bear. One day, some weeks after, Miles came upon her with the great Bible open on the table while she stared in terrified fascination at the picture of the prophet. “Surely you are not thinking of that story still!” exclaimed Miles. “Why the man has been dead and his words forgotten for nearly a hundred years. You do not think that what he said could really come true, Clotilde?” “N-no,” she faltered, closing the book with a great sigh, “I do not think his words could come true—but they might. I do not know what to think, yet I cannot put the tale out of my mind. When Master Sheffield comes home I will ask him whether I should believe it or not.”