For the rest, the little Frenchwoman's advent made but slight difference in the life at Fairmile Court, save to bring two or three more of the fine old rooms at the end of the house into occupation. Bridget was still her nursling's friend and companion, was in no wise relegated to the cold shade of mere domestic servitude. Mademoiselle Latour was too good a woman to seek to wean her pupil's affections from her old nurse. Mrs. Layburne lived her solitary life apart from the whole household, directing and governing all things, keeping the keys and ruling the servants, but holding companionship with no one. Squire Bosworth went and came between London and Fairmile as of old. When he was at home his daughter always dined with him, and spent an hour with him after dinner; and as the quiet years drifted past him, Roland Bosworth hardly noted how the child was developing into the woman, beautiful exceedingly in her bright girlish loveliness, full of impulse and vivacity, loving her life for its own sake, and desiring nothing beyond it. She had the placid contentment of a cloistered nun who knows nothing of the world outside her convent-walls, nor sighs to know it. The Squire had given her a guitar, upon which she used to accompany herself when she sang to him during his after-dinner musings over his pint of claret. He used to look at her with thoughtful, dreamy eyes as she sat in the afternoon sunlight, bending over her guitar with a graceful curve of the slender throat, her soft brown hair piled over a cushion on the top of the exquisitely shaped head, her gown of the simplest, her snowy neck shrouded with a soft lace handkerchief, her arms bare to the elbow, and the long delicate hands with slender flexible fingers, roseate-tipped and as beautiful as the hands of St. Cecilia in an old Italian picture. It was perhaps more of his ducats than of his daughter Squire Bosworth thought as he watched her dreamily, soothed by her sweet singing. He could but think of that vast fortune which would be hers to deal with when he was clay--a too convertible form of wealth, in stocks and shares, which wanton extravagance might scatter as easily as a shower of rose-petals. "I almost wish I had locked it up in land," he said to himself; "but land yields such a wretched return, and can always be mortgaged by a spendthrift. There is no power on earth that can project itself into the future, and secure the permanence of that which a man has toiled for after he is clay." And now, in this year of grace 1726, Rena was eighteen, tall, slim, graceful, active as a young fawn, and without one impulse that rebelled against her father's authority or the monotonous placidity of her life. Mademoiselle Latour declared that in all her experience of the varieties of girlhood she had never had to deal with so sweet a nature, or so bright and teachable a mind. But this might be flattery, thought the Squire, since Mademoiselle knew that her pupil was a great heiress.