Between high walls it lay: a long, narrow strip, running down to the moat on one side and abutting to the blind masonry of the keep on the other. Here her father—an ever more remote figure, and for some reason unintelligible to her child’s mind, ever more detached from the common existence of the house, took his sole taste of air and sunshine. How often, peeping in through the locked iron gates, she had watched him, with curiosity and awe, as he passed and re-passed amid the rank luxuriance of the herbs and bushes, so absorbed in cogitation that his eyes, when they fell upon the little face behind the bars, never seemed to see it.—The Herb-Garden! Naturally, this one spot (where, it seemed, grew the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil) had a vastly greater attraction for the small daughter of Eve than the paradise of which she had the freedom. Aunt Sophia had warned her that the leaf of any one of those strange herbs might be death! Yet visit the Herbary she often did, all parental threats and injunctions notwithstanding, by a secret entrance through the ruins of the keep. Strange that her thoughts should from the very hour of her return home hark back so much to the Herb-Garden! No doubt there was suggestion in all the sweet smells floating now around her. She thought she recognised _Camphire_ and _Frangipanni_; but there were others too, known yet nameless; and they brought her back to the fragrant spot, the delights of which had so long been forgotten. Her memories were nearly all of solitary childhood. Sir David, the young master of Bindon, the orphan cousin to whom Simon Rickart was in those days humourously supposed to play the part of guardian, entered but little into them, and then only as a grave Eton boy, disdainful of her torn frocks, of her soiled hands, her shrill joyousness. He and his sister Maud kept fastidiously aloof.... Maud of the black ringlets and the fine frocks, who from the first had made her little cousin realise the gulf that must exist between the child of the poor guardian and the daughter of the House. But later came a change. She was Miss Ellinor—a tall maiden, suddenly alive to the desirableness of ordered locks and pretty gowns; and young Sir David began to assume importance within her horizon. How these fleeting memories, evoked by the essence of Master Simon’s distilling, were sailing in the silence of the room round Ellinor’s head! It was during his University years. The young master brought into his house every vacation an extraordinary stir of eager life. There came batches of favoured companions, varying according to the mood of the moment:—youthful philosophers who had got so far beyond the most advanced thought of the age as to have lost all footing; or exquisite young dandies, with lisps and miraculously fitting kerseymere pantaloons and ruffles of lace before which Miss Sophia opened wide mouth and eyes; or again, serious, aristocratic striplings of earnest political views.