It seemed to Barbara Strange, as she stood looking over it all, on the day on which Mr. Harding was to come to Mitchelhurst, that there was something novel in this aspect of desolation. She knew the place well, for it was rather more than a year since she came, at her uncle's invitation, to live there, and she had seen it with all the changes of the seasons upon it. She knew it well, but she had never thought of it as home. The little Devonshire vicarage which held father and mother, and a swarm of young sisters and brothers--almost too many to be contained within its walls--was home in the past and the present. And if the girl had dreams of the future, shy dreams which hardly revealed themselves even to her, they certainly never had Mitchelhurst Place for a background. To her it was just a halting-place on her journey into the unknown regions of life. It was like some great out-of-the-way ruinous old inn, in which one might chance to sleep for a night or two. She had merely been interested in it as a stranger, but on this October day she looked at it curiously and critically for Mr. Harding's sake. She would have liked it to welcome him, to show some signs of stately hospitality to this son of the house who was coming home, and for the first time a full sense of its dreariness and hopelessness crept into her soul. She could do nothing, she felt absurdly small, the great house seemed to cast a melancholy shadow over her, as she went to and fro in the bit of ground that was still recognised as a garden, gathering the few blossoms that autumn had spared. Barbara meant the flowers to brighten the rooms in which they lived, but she looked a little doubtfully into her basket while she walked towards the house. They were so colourless and frail, it seemed to her that they were just fit to be emptied out over somebody's grave. "Oh," she said to herself, "why didn't he come in the time of roses, or peonies, or tiger lilies? If it had been in July there might have been some real sunshine to warm the old place. Or earlier still, when the apple blossom was out--why didn't he come then? It is so sad now." And she remembered what some one had said, a few weeks before, loitering up that wide path by her side: "An old house--yes, I like old houses, but this is like a whited sepulchre, somehow. And not his own--I should not care to set up housekeeping in a corner of somebody else's sepulchre." Barbara, as her little lonely footsteps fell on the sodden earth, thought that he was perfectly right. She threw back her head, and faced the wide, blind gaze of its many-windowed front. Well, it _was_ Mr. Harding's own family sepulchre, if that was any consolation.