Two pretty brown cows were leaning over and rubbing their noses against the stumps of the gate, lowing gently for human sympathy. Suddenly their heads were persuasively pushed aside, and the painter appeared, silhouetted against the saffron background. He stroked them, and then coming through, closed the gate carefully against their obtrusive noses. Mrs. Elles watched him as he walked down the path, pebbly and uneven with the washing down of previous heavy rains, between the low espalier pear trees, and disappeared under the porch a few yards to the left. Then, with a little suppressed sigh, she withdrew her gaze from the gleaming sky and turned sharply, to find the body of the girl who had waited on her at dinner in close proximity to her own. The girl had evidently been watching the painter’s entry, too, over her unsuspecting shoulders. Mrs. Elles conceived a violent dislike to her, which, in her wilful way, she was at no pains to hide. Everybody here seemed to be attached to Mr. Rivers. Through the open door of the room, she heard the landlady’s ecstatic welcome to him as he passed under the rose-hung porch of the “Heather Bell.” “Well, and here ye coom, sir!” as of one receiving a cherished lamb back into the fold. Presently, the listening woman heard him walk wearily into his sitting-room--it happened to be next door to the kind of annex in which she was--and close the door. She now felt strangely and unutterably lonely. What had she come here for? During the rest of the evening, she sat in a hard cane chair by the window, and leaned her elbow on the equally hard stone sill. The light slowly faded out of the sky and the scent of the nightstocks came to her in sweet, overpowering wafts, and the evening primroses opened wider and wider till they seemed to shine like yellow moons in the dusky garden beds. Then the real moon came out, and still she could smell nothing but the sweet smells of the garden and she wondered whether Mr. Rivers would begin to smoke enormous strong cigars or a horrid pipe, like Mortimer, and thus kill all the poetry of the evening. His window was next to the one out of which she was now leaning, and it was wide open. Her window was raw and square, his was smothered in the leaves of an immense pear which she had noticed as she came in, growing, in stiffly arranged branches like a genealogical tree, all over the southern side of the house. No, he was not smoking! What was he doing? She suddenly conceived the notion of going out of doors--of taking a walk in the Park, that is, if the porter would allow her to pass at this hour. She would see the famous yew grove she had read of, dark at noonday, and positively sepulchral at night, where the White Lady of Mortham walked and bewailed her unnamed woes. She would listen to the mysterious “hum” beetles, which served for “tuck of drum” to marshal the gallant outlaws of the ballad:--