"I wonder whether Lord Angleford knows, realizes, how big a man he is?" said Dick, as he smoked his last pipe that night in the sitting room of the lodge. "We've seen the house, but we haven't seen the park or the estates or the farms, which extend for miles around. Fancy owning all this, and a title, a name, which every boy and girl learns about when they read their English history!" "I decline to fancy to realize anything more," said Nell, with a laugh. "That old woman's voice rings in my ears, and I feel as if I were intoxicated with, overwhelmed by, the grandeur of the Anglefords. I am going to bed now, Dick. To bed in a house in the country, with the scent of the flowers stealing in at the windows! Oh, think of it! and think of--Beaumont Buildings! Dick, would it be possible to obtain the post of lodgekeeper to Anglemere House? I envy the meanest laborer on the estate. Next to being the earl himself, I think I would like to be keeper of one of the lodges, or--or chief of the laundry!" She went up to her room--a room in which the ceiling was "covered" to the shape of the thatched roof. She was brushing the long tresses of soft, fluffy black hair which Drake had loved to kiss, when she heard the sound of a horse trotting up the avenue. She went to the window, and, screened by the curtain, looked out. A full moon was shining and flooding the avenue With light. She waited, looking out absently. The sound came nearer, and suddenly the horseman came in sight. Holding the muslin curtain for a screen, she still waited and watched for him. Then, with a faint cry--a cry almost of terror--she shrank back. For the man who was riding up the avenue to Anglemere was strangely like Drake! He had passed in an instant; his head was bowed, his face only for a moment in the moonlight, and yet--and yet! Was she dreaming--was fancy only trifling with her--or was it indeed and in truth Drake himself? CHAPTER XXVII. Nell lay awake for hours, dwelling on the appearance of the horseman who had ridden by in the moonlight. It seemed to her that it was impossible that she, of all persons in the world, could be mistaken; and yet how could Drake be here, and why should he be riding up the avenue of Anglemere at this time of night? The sight of him, if it was he, aroused all the love in her heart, which needed little, indeed, to arouse it. She had tried to forget him during the vicissitudes of the last two years, but she knew that he was still enshrined in her heart, that while life lasted she must love him and long for him. She endeavored, by thinking of him as betrothed--perhaps married--to Lady Luce, as belonging to her, to oust her love for him as a sin, as shameful as it was futile; but there was scarcely an hour of the day in which her thoughts did not turn to him, and at night she awoke from some dream, in which he was the central figure, with an aching heart.