So Lady Forestfield came to Woodburn, and a very few days after her arrival acknowledged to herself the wisdom of Uffington's counsel. The fresh pure air brought back the roses to her cheeks; and in her daily wanderings in the park and through the surrounding woods she gradually acquired the calm happiness and peace of mind which nature can alone restore to a soul that has been bruised and buffeted in its conflict with the world. Hitherto, at least since the days of her childhood, May had had but little appreciation of the beauties of nature; the park had been merely so much land lying between the house and the village, and she had only visited the woods for the sake of having luncheon with a shooting-party. Now all their beauties were gradually revealed to her. She would sit for hours in an oriel window of a little room which she had taken for her own, and which overlooked the park, watching the sun doing battle with the heavy dun autumnal clouds, and the wide expanse of landscape kindling into light. She took delight even in gazing on the great bare fields whence the golden grain had been reaped and carried, and the long ranges of hops gathered by the busy pickers, their dark poles, piled together in fantastic shapes, alone remaining to remind one of their recent existence. She loved to ramble in the home wood, which on her first arrival had been a sombre mass of dark green, and which now stood out flecked here and there with tints of yellow, brown, and red. For all she met she had a kindly greeting and a pleasant word. The husbandman, tramping over the newly-turned fresh-smelling earth as his furrow made the never-varying pattern, and the toiling many-childrened women in the cottages, for the first time began to understand that the 'people in the 'All' could take any interest in their welfare. When the days were wet, too, May was never dull or depressed; for the library was filled with books, and literature, which in her childhood she had loved so much, but had so long left unheeded, now again became her constant solace; and in her walks and drives, in her studies and endeavours to help the poor of the estate, May had a ready and intelligent companion in Eleanor Irvine, who, at her urgent request, came to her almost as soon as she was settled at Woodburn, and had remained with her ever since.