A glorious old place that castle where Earl Verner resided, full of odd nooks and corners, with quaint gables, and grey, ivy-clad turrets; a castle which had held out for months during the great rebellion. The older portion had been supplemented with some new buildings designed in harmony with the ancient architecture of the original building. Before this history is complete the reader may be called upon to visit Montem Castle: until then it is not necessary, perhaps, to say more than that it was the ancient seat of the Verner family. CHAPTER IX. WHICH INTRODUCES THE READER TO THE SUMMER-HOUSE ON BERNE HILLS, AND ILLUSTRATES THE TRUTH OF AN OLD PROVERB ABOUT EAVES-DROPPERS. It was pleasantly situated at the top of Berne Hills. It had originally been a watch-tower, but Mr. Tallant had converted it into what they called the summer-house. There were comfortable seats in it, and a few odd books and pictures. It commanded sixty miles or more of scenery, flat, undulating, and mountainous; wood, water, and pastures; towns, villages, and hamlets. You might search the country through, and not find a scene more truly English and more perfectly beautiful. In spring, if you journeyed to that summit from Barton Hall, when the sun was shining and the sky serene, you might fancy yourself in the Happy Valley indeed. The way is over meadows, down lanes, up sloping hill-sides, through woods, and by rippling water-courses. There are violets in the hedgerows, and daffodils in the meadows, and primroses in the woods. Anemones tremble in secluded thickets, and there are fruit-trees in bloom in the distant orchards, that gleam through the faintly green trees. Phœbe Tallant and Amy Somerton walked up to the summer-house several times in the spring and summer months; sometimes they rode part of the way on rough ponies, but oftener they walked the whole distance, interrupted only by a stray deer from the adjacent park of Montem Castle or a fox from the Berne covers. Only, did I say, by a deer or a fox? Truly; for was not Mr. Phillips a fox, to sketch so continually amongst those Berne Hills? The day after Amy Somerton had received her brother’s full report about Mr. Hammerton, she proposed a walk to the summer-house, and Miss Tallant gladly accepted the challenge. Phœbe was always ready for a long ramble; and the spring sunshine on this day was particularly inviting. Taking their alpine sticks and donning their jauntiest hats, our two fair maidens, arm in arm, passed over the smooth, green lawn, and soon disappeared behind the shrubs and trees. Luke Somerton, who had been up into the woods for a brace of rabbits, watched them unobserved as they entered the lane near Barton Hall, and an expression of pride lighted up his manly face as he gazed on the supple and graceful form of his daughter Amy.