"I could be quite satisfied even with that," she considered. "I could soon make it look different," and she stood leaning over the gate and picturing the place with grass close under the window, with a few evergreens planted against the palings, with a rustic garden-chair with rustic baskets filled with flowers, on the scrap of lawn she herself had imagined. As she so stood an old woman came to the door and looked down the walk at the stranger curiously. "I was admiring your dear little place," said Dolly apologetically. "I think it is so sweet and quiet." The woman trotted down to the gate on hearing these words of praise, and answered, "Aye, it is main pretty in the summer, when the flowers are in full blow, and the trees in full leaf. I tell my master we shall often think of it in the strange land we are going to." Now this sentence perplexed Dolly; owing to the tone in which it was spoken, she could not tell whether the woman meant she and her husband were going to heaven or to foreign parts, so she asked no question. She only said, "I am sure you will think it no trouble to give me a glass of water. I have been walking a long way, and I am very tired." "Come in and rest yourself then," the old lady exclaimed heartily, and she conducted Dolly indoors, and dusted a chair for her, and brought her the water ice-cold; and having elicited that Mrs. Mortomley had come all the way from London, that she had walked miles, that she had been to look at Hughes's house, and that neither bite nor sup had passed her lips since breakfast save that glass of cold water, she asked if her visitor would not like a cup of tea. The kettle was on, she said, and she could mash the tea in a few minutes. Dolly was delighted, she wanted the tea, and she rejoiced in the adventure. What though the bread was home-made bread and as heavy as lead, to quote poor Hood; what though the tea was "mashed" till it was black in the face; what though the sugar was brown and of a treacley consistence,--the guest brought to the repast an appetite which charmed her hostess and amazed herself. While Dolly sipped her tea, for she understood the teapot had no great force of resistance and could not hold out to great extremity, and the "darling old lady," as Mrs. Mortomley called her for ever afterwards, drank hers out of a saucer, the two women got into a friendly conversation, and the elder told the younger how she and her master were going to America to their only son, who, after being "awful wild," and a "fearful radical," often going well-nigh to break his father's heart, who had set "great store" by his boy, had started off fifteen years previously "for Ameriky unbeknown to living soul." Arrived there it was the old story of the prodigal repeated, with a difference. At home he had wasted his substance and neglected his parents. Abroad he repented him of his evil doings, and worked as hard in a strange country as he had idled in England.