CHAPTER XXXVII. When Elinor received the official document which had so extraordinary an effect upon her life, and overturned in a moment all the fabric of domestic quiet and security which she had been building up for years, it was outside the tranquil walls of the house at Lakeside, in the garden which lay between it and the high-road, opening upon that not very much-frequented road by a pair of somewhat imposing gates, which gave the little establishment an air of more pretension than it really possessed. Some fine trees shrouded the little avenue, and Elinor was standing under one of them, stooping over a little nest of primroses at its roots, from which the yellow buds were peeping forth, when she heard behind her the sound of a vehicle at the gates, and the quick leap to the ground of someone who opened them. Then there was a pause; the carriage, whatever it was, did not come farther, and presently she herself, a little curious, turned round to see a man approaching her, whom she did not know. A dog-cart driven by another, whose face she recognized, waited in the road while the stranger came forward. "You are Mrs. Compton, ma'am?" he said. A swift thrill of alarm, she could scarcely tell why, ran over Elinor from head to foot. She had been settled for nearly eighteen years at Lakeside. What could happen to frighten her now? but it tingled to her very fingers' ends. And then he said something to her which she scarcely understood, but which sent that tingle to her very heart and brain, and gave her the suspicious looking blue paper which he held in his hand. It all passed in a moment of time to her dazed yet excited consciousness. The early primrose which she had gathered had not had time to droop in her grasp, though she crushed the stalk unconsciously in her fingers, before the gates were closed again, the sound of the departing wheels growing faint on the road, and she herself standing like one paralyzed with that thing in her hand. A subpoena!--what was a subpoena? She knew as little, perhaps less, than the children in the parish school, who began to troop along the road in their resounding clogs at their dinner hour. The sound of this awoke her a little to a frightened sense that she had better put this document out of sight, at least until she could manage to understand it. And then she sped swiftly away past the pretty white house lying in the sunshine, with all its doors and windows open, to the little wood behind, where it would be possible to think and find out at her leisure what this was. It was a small wood and a public path ran through it; but where the public was so limited as at Lakeside this scarcely impaired the privacy of the inhabitants, at least in the morning, when everybody in the parish was at work. Elinor hurried past the house that her mother might not see her, and climbed the woody hillock to a spot which was peculiarly her own, and where a seat had been placed for her special use. It was a