One of the chief, if not the only, pleasure of Alison's life of routine was, on sunny days, to take her little charges into Kensington Gardens, and set them by the margin of the blue Round Pond, and watch its tiny fleet of toy ships skimming to and fro, with the hideous, Dutch-looking palace of Kensington as a background--a palace, the rooms of which are only remarkable for memories of William of Orange (and, let us add, of Glencoe) and Elizabeth Villiers, the hideous, one-eyed Countess of Orkney; but stately, even grand, are the avenues of old trees that grow thereby. 'How many secrets have been overheard by these ancient elms since Heneage Finch built the boundary-fence of his pleasance! Could their experience be set forth for the behoof of modern lovers, would they be apt,' asks a writer, 'to encourage or to warn?' The old palace is still there as it was when the home of the Finches, with its three irregular quadrangles, built of red brick, ornamented with columns, quoins, and cornices of indifferent stone, unchanged as when Solmes Blues mounted guard and the early Georges swore and blustered in broken English and guttural German; but how changed are all its surroundings, for miles upon miles of streets stretch far to the westward, southward, and northward of it now. When James VI., accustomed to old Edinburgh within its 'Flodden Wall,' was so startled with the size of the petty London of his time that, in his famous speech in the Star Chamber, in 1616, he declared that its size made it a nuisance to the nation, that he would have all new edifices pulled down, and the builders committed to prison, he could little foresee the London of the days of steam! And, often as she sat there under the stately trees, Alison loved to ponder over the days when the old Court suburb was remote from London, for in 1750, where now we find busy Westbourne Grove, stood a solitary house, called Western Green, three miles distant from Hyde Park; and so lately as 1830, on the Bayswater side of the Gardens, were Kensington Gravel Pits, facing the Broad Walk, stretching away to what is now called Bayswater, which was formerly renowned for the springs and conduits for which the city was then indebted for pure water. It was famous then for its tea gardens, there called the Flora, extending the whole length of Lancaster Gate. So, book in hand, while the children played near her on the grass, Alison would sit in Kensington Gardens for hours lost in reverie, while the bees hummed in the hot air at the flower-beds near the Serpentine, and the sun blazed without mercy on the sheet of shining water that stretched away towards the Albert Gate; but, when certain thoughts of the past occurred to her, there would seem no beauty in that summer scene, nor warmth even in the sunshine, for there was a dull, weary, and aching crave at her heart, with the ever-recurring question--Where was Bevil, and why did he not make an effort to seek her out?