In these fancies the young friends who occasionally came over to see her, riding their ponies or driving their governess-carts, from distant country-houses, had never any share. More was told to a boy with whom at one time little Penelope had been much thrown. David Winfrith, the son of a neighbouring clergyman, who, when shunned for no actual fault of his own, had seen himself and his only child received very kindly by Lord and Lady Wantley, was older than Penelope by those three or four years which in childhood count so much, and later count so little. He had spent more than one holiday at Monk's Eype, sharing Penelope's play-room, which, partly hollowed out of the cliff, was lifted a few feet above the beach by rude stone pillars. There a large solid table, filling up the whole space in front of the wide window, made a fine 'vantage-ground for the display of the boy's skill as toy-maker and boat-builder. Penelope, looking back, associated David Winfrith with her earliest memories of Monk's Eype, and for her the villa, especially certain of the great rooms of which the furnishings had been so little disturbed for close on a hundred years, was instinct also with the thought and the vanished figure of her father, who, when wearied and cast down by being brought into contact with the misery he did so much to relieve, found in his western home a great source of consolation and peace. II Lord Wantley, or rather his wife, had been among the first and most ardent patrons of the group of painters who chose to be known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. More than one of these had spent happy days at Monk's Eype, and it had been owing to the advice of the most famous survivor of the early P.R.B. that Penelope had been allowed, and even encouraged, to devote much of her early girlhood to the serious pursuit of art. How far her parents had been right her mother sometimes doubted; but there could be no doubt that the great artist had truly divined in the beautiful girl a touch of exceptional power--some would have called it by a rarer name. It was not his fault if such circumstances as youth, rank, beauty, and ultimately great wealth, had asserted their claims, and turned one who might have been a great woman artist into an amateur. Therefore it was rather as a lover of beauty and as a woman, fully, if rather disdainfully, conscious of her own feminine supremacy, that Mrs. Robinson had been so far well content to leave the spacious rooms of her own, as it had been her father's, favourite home, in much the same order as when they had been arranged under the eye of her great-uncle Ludovic, known in local story as the Popish Lord Wantley.