Only my Love's away, I'd as lief the blue were gray. In the spring I took a cold, and was for a time more or less kept to the house. Esther as usual took her walks abroad, and would bring me home primroses from the wood, or wild anemones, daffodils, and violets from the cloisters of the old abbey. She was everything that was sweet to me, as always, yet I noticed that she was less dependent on me than of old. In the old days, if I could not be with her she, too, kept the house. But I could not grudge her her walks, seeing how she came in from them full of life and vigour, and would lay her cold, fresh cheek to mine with such compassion for my house-bound state. Then something happened that put Harry De Lacy for the time out of all our minds, for with us Brandons blood is thicker than water in a truer sense than it is of most families. CHAPTER X. FROM THE NIGHT AND THE STORM. For some time Pierce's letters had been irregular, and when they came had been the merest scraps, very unsatisfactory to Aline, one could see, though she often said that, moving about so much as he did, Pierce couldn't be expected to write letters like a home-keeping woman. Then had come a couple of months of silence, during which Aline fretted visibly, at least during the latter portion of the time, for of course she did not begin to worry at once, and there had been the distraction of young De Lacy's accident and convalescence in the house. It was now April, and blithe, beautiful weather. The smaller trees were all in leaf, and the bigger ones were cloudy with the coming leafage. It was sunny every day, with a touch of east wind, which brought the most beautiful colours on Brandon Hill, bronzes and crimsons and golds, instead of his usual soft azures. The kitchen-garden was a forest of white blossom, and the apple-buds were pushing open a little rosier every day. I was getting rid of my cold, and was out walking every day on the sheltered side of the house, in the gardens, or on the grassy terrace overlooking the rose-garden. I came on Oona one day in the kitchen-garden picking spinach into her apron. "Why, Oona," I said, "you are going to give us an early dish. I thought you wouldn't be putting it on the table for a fortnight yet." "There'll be a stranger to dinner, Miss Hilda. Three nights running I've dreamt of a man dressed in black, but the face of him I couldn't see, coming in over the threshold stone, and this morning there was a stranger in my tea-cup, so there's someone coming over the hill." "And you've picked the spinach because of your dreams." "Yes, and killed a pair of chickens. One of them was a pullet, but as she'd learned to crow it couldn't be lucky to keep her. Chickens, an' a bit o' bacon, an' a dish o' spinach is good feeding for anybody, if it was Miss Freda or Master Pierce even." "Your banshee never came to anything, Oona," I said. "The year's not out, Miss Hilda," she answered solemnly.