Agneta prized all the enchanting wonder, strangeness, and freedom of the new world she had entered, with the vivid appreciation of a girl who had been kept strictly in leading-strings all her days, who had followed one narrow, worn path till it was direly commonplace and stale to her, who, in the middle of a continual round of book-teaching, was as profoundly ignorant of the work-a-day world, and the struggling, suffering, rejoicing, sorrowing life lived on every side of her, as if she were a novice in a convent parlour. To rise two or three hours before her accustomed time the one day, to have breakfast standing on the parlour table till noon the next—since Harry was fitful, to say the least, in his practices of getting up and taking his meals—formed an agreeable variety on Miss Dennison’s petrified virtues of punctuality and method. To be invested with the important functions involved in pouring out coffee for Harry and Horry was flattering to Agneta’s still starved vanity. To have no tasks in Ariosto, Corneille, and Schiller—which, though custom enabled her to get through them glibly, the absence of all student affinities rendered irksome—was a sensible relief to her. Instead, Agneta could dawdle in the porch or in the shadow of the great pear-tree in the paddock, and read one of Harry’s red-and-yellow railway-stall volumes. She could not dip far into it, certainly, without noticing that it was as horribly ‘loud’ inside as out. But it was also new and exciting like everything else on this untrodden ground. Its characters bounced and struggled after a robust fashion, did not trip or stalk in a shadowy manner, as the heroes and heroines of her classics had tripped and stalked to Agneta. To be exonerated from practising was another huge boon to a girl who was not intensely musical, and to whom the news that there was no piano in the house sounded the best of jokes. The small, austerely plain farmhouse, with the ‘lean-to’ preserving a venerable houseleek which flaunted over the greater portion of the sloping roof, was out of all proportion to its large offices where they stood massed together, ‘Warm with the breath of kine.’ The voices of poultry resounded through the shaggy paddock. Cowslips and primroses, as well as daisies, flourished in their season, among the uncut grass, and the white buttons of mushrooms showed themselves conspicuously among the seeded flowers and withered leaves of autumn.