Mrs. Burgoyne and the little girls were always most cordial to visitors. They spent these first days deep in gardening, great heaps of fragrant dying weeds about them, and raw vistas through the pruned trees already beginning to show the gracious slopes of the land, and the sleepy Lobos down beneath the willows. The Carew children and the little Browns were often there, fascinated by the outdoor work, as children always are, and little Billy Valentine squirmed daily through his own particular gap in the hedge, and took his share of the fun with a deep and silent happiness. Billy gave Mrs. Burgoyne many a heartache, with his shock of bright, unbrushed hair, his neglected grimed little hands, his boyish little face that was washed daily according to his own small lights, with surrounding areas of neck and ears wholly overlooked, and his deep eyes, sad when he was sad, and somehow infinitely more pathetic when he was happy. Sometimes she stealthily supplied Billy with new garters, or fastened the buttons on his blue overalls, or even gave him a spoonful of "meddy" out of a big bottle, at the mere sight of which Ellen shuddered sympathetically; a dose which was always followed by two marshmallows, out of a tin box, by way of consolation. But further than this she dared not go, except in the matter of mugs of milk, gingerbread, saucer-pies, and motherly kisses for any bump or bruise. The village women, coming up to the Hall, in the pleasant summer afternoons, were puzzled to find the old place almost unchanged. Why any woman in her senses wanted to live among those early-Victorian horrors, the women of Santa Paloma could not imagine. But Mrs. Burgoyne never apologized for the old walnut chairs and tables, and the old velvet carpets, and the hopelessly old-fashioned white lace curtains and gilt-framed mirrors. Even Captain Holly's big clock--"an impossibly hideous thing," Mrs. White called the frantic bronze horses and the clinging tiger, on their onyx hillside--was serenely ticking, and the pink china vases were filled with flowers. And there was an air of such homely comfort, after all, about the big rooms, such a fragrance of flowers, and flood of sunny fresh air, that the whole effect was not half as bad as it might be imagined; indeed, when Mammy Curry, the magnificent old negress who was supreme in the kitchen and respected in the nursery as well, came in with her stiff white apron and silver tea-tray, she seemed to fit into the picture, and add a completing touch to the whole.