In the second autumn of Lady Cecil's dependence the dowager carried her niece and her parlour-maid to a pretty little village on the Hampshire coast--a sleepy little village, where the fruit was blown off the trees in farmers' orchards by the fresh breath of ocean breezes--a village nestling under the shadow of brown, sun-burnt hills, a long, straggling street of rustic cottages, with here and there a quaint old gabled dwelling-place of a better class, shut in by moss-grown walls, and nestling in such gardens as are to be seen on that south-western coast. Very few cockney visitors ever invaded the drowsy hamlet of Fortinbras, where the watering-place _habitué_ would have looked in vain for the cliffs or the jetty, the brazen band and the buff slippers, the Ethiopian serenaders and the wheel of fortune--so dear to his cockney soul. At Fortinbras there were only two bathing-machines, and the sole attraction which the place possessed for sightseers was a grand old Norman castle, whose mighty keep towered high above the farmyards and orchards, and within whose walls red-shirted cricketers met on sunny summer afternoons, and whither village Sunday-school children came now and then to feast on buns and tea. The coast of Fortinbras was low and flat and weedy, and sometimes a faint odour of stale seaweed floated up from the shining sands on the evening air. Your cockney would have fled aghast from the place as "un'ealthy;" but for Lady Cecil the rustic village and the weedy coast had an odour of Longfellow and Tennyson that was delicious to her soul, and she felt as if she would have been unutterably happy if she could have bidden an eternal farewell to Dorset Square and Mrs. MacClaverhouse's plate-chest and china-closet, to take up her abode under the shelter of the Norman castle and the grassy hills for the rest of her life. She wandered alone on the wet sands while her aunt took an after-dinner nap on the first evening of their arrival. She lingered by the cool grey sea, and watched the changing glories of the low western sky in a kind of rapture. "And there are people who like Dorset Square better than this," she thought. "Oh, dear, dear lonely place, how I love you!"