It was midwinter when Jasper Treverton died. Spring had come in all her glory--her balmy airs and sultry noontides, stolen from summer; her variety and wealth of wood and meadow blossoms; her snowy orchard bloom, tinted with carnation; her sweetness and freshness of beauty--a season to be welcomed and enjoyed like no other season in the changing year; a little glimpse of Paradise on earth between the destroying gales of March and the fatal thunderstorms of July. Spring had filled all the lanes and glades round Hazlehurst with perfume and colour when John Treverton reappeared in the village, as unexpectedly as if he had dropped from the skies. Eliza Sampson was destroying the aphids on a favourite rose tree, handling them daintily with the tips of her gloved fingers, as if she loved them, when Mr. Treverton appeared at the little iron gate, carrying his own portmanteau. He, the heir of all the ages, and of what signified much more in Miss Sampson’s estimation, an estate worth fourteen thousand a year. ‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘Mr. Treverton, how could you? We would have sent the boy to the station.’ ‘How could I do what?’ he asked, laughing at her horrified look. ‘Carry your own portmanteau. Tom will be so vexed.’ ‘Tom need know nothing about it, if it will vex him. The portmanteau is light enough, and I have only brought it from the “George,” where the ’bus dropped me. You see I have taken your brother at his word, Miss Sampson, and have come to quarter myself upon you for a few days.’ ‘Tom will be delighted,’ said Eliza. She was meditating how the dinner she had arranged for Tom and herself could be made to do for the heir of Hazlehurst Manor. It was one of those dinners in which the economical housekeeper delights, a dinner that clears up every scrap in the larder, and leaves not so much as a knuckle-bone for the predatory ‘follower,’ male or female, the cook’s hungry niece, or the housemaid’s young man. A little soup, squeezed, as by hydraulic pressure, out of cleanly picked bones and odd remnants of gristle; a dish of hashed mutton, a very small hash, fenced round with a machicolated parapet of toasted bread; a beefsteak pudding with a kidney in it, boiled in a basin the size of a breakfast-cup. This latter savoury mess was intended to gratify Tom, who was prejudiced against hashed mutton, and always pretended that it disagreed with him. For _entremets sucrés_ there were a dish of stewed rhubarb and a mould of boiled rice, wholesome, simple, and inexpensive. It was a little dinner which did honour to Miss Sampson’s head and heart; but she felt that it was not good enough for the future lord of Hazlehurst, a gentleman out of whom her brother hoped to make plenty of money by-and-by. ‘I’ll go and see about your room while you have a chat with Tom in the office,’ she said, tripping lightly away, and leaving John Treverton on the lawn in front of the drawing-room windows, a closely-shorn piece of grass about fifty feet by twenty-five.