“Where has she run to now?” they could hear Jean’s voice saying at a distance, and Miss Grace gave her young sister a hasty kiss and hurried away. Margaret lay still and listened for a long time while Jean’s voice perambulated the house, going everywhere. It gave a new sort of brisk activity to the dark and cold place. Up and down and about the passages went the high-pitched tones, commenting on everything. It was seldom that Margaret could make out what they said. But the sound made a cheer and comfort, a sense of society and protection. By-and-by she got drowsy with those cheerful echoes in her ears, and dropped at last into the deep sleep of youth, with a sense of this peaceful patrolling all about her, the darkness lighted by gleams of the candles they carried, and by Jean’s voice. And in the morning what a flood of sunshine filled the room! lavish, extravagant sunshine pouring in, as if it had nothing else to do; which indeed was pretty nearly the case, as all the harvest was housed about the Grange, and there was not much, except light matters of fruit, for that magnificent sun to do, nothing but to ripen the peaches on the walls and the apples on the trees, and wake for a joke, with a blaze and illumination which might have done for a king, a little bit of a slim girl in the low-roofed chamber with its many windows. Margaret woke all in a moment, as you wake with a start when some one stands and looks at you fixedly, penetrating the strongest bond of drowsiness. She sprang up, her mind already full of excitement as she recollected where she was: in the Grange, in her own house! a curious thrill of pleasure, and wonder, and eager curiosity came over her. She got up and dressed hastily in her eagerness to see her surroundings. From her windows she looked out upon nothing but trees, a walled garden on one side, a little park on the other, a glimpse of a small stream with a little wooden bridge over it, and trees, and more trees as far as the eye could go. Her eye went as far as eye could go in that unconscious appeal for something to rest upon which is instinctively made by all who are accustomed to hills; but there was no blue line upon the horizon, no undulation to relieve her. The only inequality was in the trees, which were some lower and some more lofty--in tufts of rich foliage everywhere, shading the landscape like a delicate drawing. Though it would not be September till next day, yet there were already traces here and there that autumn had tinted the woods with that “fiery finger.” It was nothing more than a touch; but it brightened the picture. How different from the parched elms and oaks all bare with the wind, and the dark unchanging firs in the Earl’s-hall woods!