On Saturday and Sunday she went away into the country with some friends of her own age to stay at a distant country place and to spend the quick hours in very happy holiday-making, returning to school on Monday morning with more energy and cheerfulness than she had known for a week. Affairs of various kinds kept her occupied so late that it was not until the long daylight hour after dinner that she was free to hasten away up Somerset Lane. As she came to the gate she saw with delight that there were lights in the upper windows, that the doors stood open and that the whole place had a more cheerful look than it had recently worn. Even Dick, sitting on the gate post and conversing with himself in happy gutturals, seemed trying to announce that the mistress of the house was once more at home. Miss Miranda said nothing of her journey except to thank Elizabeth most warmly and gratefully for saving the garden in her absence. “You should hear Michael sing your praises,” she said. “He has so little to say of any one that it is amazing to hear how he talks of you. He cannot make up his mind whether we have saved our season’s crop through your resourcefulness or because last week he buried a luckpenny at the head of the garden. But I know what I think!” They went out together to inspect the whole place, to wonder at the growth of the vegetables after the rain, and to admire the plumpness of the ducks and the white Leghorn chicks, hatched while Miss Miranda was away. Betsey noticed that her friend still looked worn and anxious and that the old trick of looking quickly over her shoulder when a step went past the gate, was not gone. But of her journey she still said nothing. “I think,” Miss Miranda remarked at last, “that it would be pleasant to walk over to the big house—or where the big house stood—and look at the flowers there. The peonies should be out by now. I was thinking of them to-day, of how cool and white they were and what banks of them should be blooming under the dining-room windows. The air feels close to-night, but there is nearly always a breeze stirring under the pine trees across the slope of the hill.” The high gray wall that edged the lawn by the cottage was, as Elizabeth knew, the boundary of the grounds belonging to the big, ruined house. She had looked often at the gate, with its round archway, but she had never passed through it and into the crooked path beyond. The lock was rusty and difficult to turn, she noted, as though Miss Miranda did not often pass that way herself. She felt a flutter of excitement as they went through the gate, feeling that she was about to explore some of those mysteries that had been puzzling more people than herself alone.