The soldier smoked another pipe in a dreamy reverie, in which his thoughts still hovered about one familiar spot in his native country--a long, low, stone-built farmhouse, standing alone upon a broad plateau of bare moorland, very dreary of aspect in winter,--a dismal, ghastly-looking homestead, in which the ornamental had been sacrificed to the useful,--a gaunt, naked-looking dwelling-place, upon whose decoration or improvement a ten-pound note had not been expended within the memory of man,--a house which had gone down through three generations of close-fisted, cross-grained owners, and which had grown uglier and drearier under the rule of each generation. This was the habitation which stood as clearly out against the vague background of Francis Tredethlyn’s dreams as if it had been palpably present upon the rising ground on the other side of the bay. This was the house; and in the low narrow doorway, fronting the desolate expanse of stunted brown grass, the soldier saw the slender figure of a girl--a girl with dark, gentle eyes, and a quaker-like dress of coarse brown stuff,--a girl who stood with her hand shading her eyes, looking at the distant figure of an old man plodding homeward in the winter twilight. He had so often seen her thus, that it was only natural the picture of her should present itself to his mind to-night, as his thoughts wandered homeward. He was so far away from this girl and the familiar place in which she lived, that it seemed almost impossible to him that he could ever see her again, or tread the well-known pathways along which he had so often walked by her side. He thought of her almost as the dead may think of the living--if they do think of us. “Poor little Susy! I wonder whether she loved me--whether she loves me still? I wasn’t like some of your lovers,--I wasn’t one of your desperate fellows. I had no hot fits, or cold fits, or jealous fits, or such like, and there are some folks that might say I was never in love at all. But I was very fond of Susy--poor little tender-hearted Susy! I used to think of her, somehow, as if she had been my little sister. I think of her like that now.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER III. TIDINGS OF HOME.