hollyhocks and bee-hives; the thatched cottages by the roadside, with groups of wide-eyed children standing at the doors to see the carriage pass; the smell of the hay and the red clover in the fields, and the honeysuckle and the sweet-briar in the hedges; the sound of the wood pigeons cooing in the plantations; the first sight of her own lodge gates, with their great ramping griffins stonily pawing the air, and of those miles and miles of shadow-dappled sward within, those mysterious dark coverts, whence now and then a stag looked out at her and went crashing back to his ferny lair, and those odorous avenues of beech and lime, still haunted by belated bees and buzzing cockchafers, under which she passed to the inner enclosure of lawns and gardens where the old house stood, with open doors of welcome, awaiting her. What an old house! She had seen such in pictures--in the little prints that adorned old-fashioned pocket-books of her mother's time---but the reality, as in the case of the Continental palaces, transcended all her dreams. White smoke curled up to the sky from the fluted chimney-stacks; the diamond-paned casements--little sections of the enormous mullioned windows--were set wide to the evening breezes and sunshine; on the steps before the porch a group of servants, respectful but not obsequious, stood ready to receive their new mistress, and to efface themselves as soon as they had made her welcome. "It is more than my share," she said, almost oppressed by all these evidences of her prosperity, and thinking of her mother's different lot. "It doesn't seem fair, Kingscote." "It is not fair," he replied. "But that is not your fault, nor mine. We are not going to keep it all to ourselves, you and I--because a king happened to fall in love with one of our grandmothers, who was no better than she should be--which is our title to be great folks, I believe. We are going to let other people have a share. But just for a little while we'll be selfish, Elizabeth; it's a luxury we don't indulge in often." So he led her into the beautiful house, after giving her a solemn kiss upon the threshold; and passing through the great hall, she was taken to a vast but charming bedroom that had been newly fitted up for her on the ground floor, and thence to an adjoining sitting-room, looking out upon a shady lawn--a homely, cosy little room that he had himself arranged for her private use, and which no one was to be allowed to have the run of, he told her, except him.