The Lavendale coach had been ordered out to carry the two young men to Fairmile Court with all due ceremony. "It smells as mouldy as a mausoleum," said his lordship, as he stepped into the carriage. Fairmile Court had a less neglected and desolate aspect than it had worn fifteen years before, when the Squire adopted the vagrant's baby. The very presence of girlhood in the gray old house seemed to have brightened it. Mademoiselle Latour's influence had also been for good; governess and pupil had contrived to inspire the scanty household with a love of neatness and order; and their own deft hands had dusted and polished the quaint old furniture, and had filled great bowls of common garden flowers, and glorified the old fireplaces with beau-pots, and had worked wonders without spending an extra shilling of the Squire's beloved money. All this had been done without any resistance offered by Mrs. Barbara Layburne, who as long as she enjoyed substantial power, ruled over the store-closets and wine-cellars, paid tradesmen and servants, and regulated supplies of all kinds, cared not who beautified rooms which she never entered, or cultivated flowers which she never looked at. As the years went by, she had retired more and more within herself, spending her days in the solitude of that little wainscoted parlour which she had chosen for her retreat on her first coming to Fairmile. It was almost the smallest, and assuredly the dismallest, room in the house, at the end of a long dark passage, and overlooking the stable-yard. Here she lived apart from all the household, and with no companion save that old harpsichord which startled the stillness sometimes late in the evening, accompanying a contralto voice of exceptional power even in its decay. Those occasional strains of melody had a ghostlike sound to Irene's ear, and always saddened her. Indeed, Mrs. Barbara's personality had ever been one of the overshadowing influences of the girl's life. She shrank with an involuntary recoil from any intercourse with that strange wreck of the past. The pale stern face with its traces of lost beauty chilled her soul. "I do not think you can be many years younger than Mrs. Layburne," the girl said to her governess one day. "I doubt if she is not my junior by some years, pet." "And yet you never give me the idea of being old, and she seems as if her youth and all its happiness must have come to an end a century ago." "Ah, that is because my youth was a very calm and quiet business, Rena, while I doubt hers was full of incident and passion. She is an extinct volcano, my dear. The fires were all burnt out years ago, and only the dark grim mountain remains, enclosing nothing but ashes and hollowness. Such women are like corpses that walk about after the spirit has fled. Mrs. Layburne must have ceased to live long ago." * * * * *