The duchess journeyed with her own horses, and from the state of the roads in those days there was leisure during their progress for much reflection. By the time the dark blue outlines of the mountains became visible, the Lady Winifred had learned to subdue her raptures, and to resume the staid and sober demeanour which had been usual to her in the convent, but which had in some measure given way under the excitement of her first arrival in England. When once established in the castle, of which Lord Powis considered his mother as the mistress, and where he himself only occasionally resided, the Lady Winifred found her life nearly as monotonous as it had been at Bruges. She had the pleasure of looking upon the beauties of nature, it is true; but it was only from a distance. The duchess would have considered it improper and undignified for her daughter to have strayed beyond the terrace which surrounded two sides of the castle, or the pleasaunce, which, having been neglected during the years that the Herbert family passed in exile, now rather resembled a straggling orchard, and, although superior in extent, was very inferior in neatness and cultivation to the trim garden of the Augustine convent at Bruges. There were moments when the Lady Winifred looked back with regret to her convent life--when she thought with painful tenderness of her beloved sister--when she keenly felt the want of congenial companions. Her mother, serious and abstracted, would sometimes pass whole hours in unbroken silence. Seated in her carved arm-chair of black oak, with its high back and its velvet cushions, she industriously plied her needle at the elaborate piece of carpet-work which had occupied her fingers, though not her thoughts, for the last twelve years; while the Lady Winifred as patiently toiled at the delicate embroidery, in the execution of which persons brought up in foreign convents are usually so skilful. An airing in the ponderous coach, through roads which would now be deemed impassable, constituted the only break in the routine of their life. But even then, there was no one to whom she might exclaim upon the beauties of the Dovey, the rich interchange of meadow and mountain, wood and fields of waving grain, or admire the more majestic glories of Cader Idris; which, although inferior in height to Snowdon, strikes the eye as being more lofty, from its more abrupt and bolder outline. The daughter of Rachael Evans had been appointed as the personal attendant of the Lady Winifred, and notwithstanding the difference in their birth, their condition, and their education, it was not long before the high-born Lady Winifred Herbert discovered in the humble Amy Evans a spirit as simple, as ardent, as unsophisticated, as her own.