'I am looking forward very much to seeing him; he is new,' said she, compressing her lips and looking darkly out of the window. 'But I think I should have liked his friend best, the one who died. It was very odd, wasn't he called Maurice, too? He must have been awfully nice, to make any one so very fond of him.'

'My dear,' said Agnes Morrison, it takes more "niceness," as you call it, to love than to be loved.'

'I know!' answered Dagmar. 'But he is dead, you see; so the gods loved him too! That's why I think he must have been interesting. I wonder if this Maurice will talk about him at all, or if we shall ever see a new picture among those old portraits at the Court which will tell us what he was like?'

'Dick!' said Mrs. Tyndal, gently, really you must not wait for any more breakfast. There is the pony at the door.'

'Have you got all your books?' cried Day, waking up from her dream, and without any apology flying out into the hall to find the young gentleman's knapsack and rummage therein. She found all the lesson-books there but one, and in its place a sixpenny edition of Percival Keene, which she threw at his head with remarkable precision of aim. He dodged it, and she flew off to get him the missing book, while he put on his boots, helping him to arrange the strap of the knapsack, and following him out on the steps to watch him mount his pony with most motherly care and interest.

Raymond had sauntered out of the dining-room after her. What are you going to do this morning?' he asked, when Dick was out of sight.

'Well! first I must feed my animals, and then I shall do some German.'

'May I come with you, and assist in both occupations?'

'Of course, if you like,' she answered, with a frank look of wonder; but mother and Agnes will be in the morning-room, and you will find their morning occupations far more civilised than mine.'

'I had rather come with you,' said Raymond, quietly.

'Then wait for me here a moment while I fetch the things. I won't be long.'

It was not long, but more than a moment, before she came back, with a large holland apron with pockets, and a basket of corn.

'I am sorry to have made you wait so long,' she said, gravely; but there are so many things to see after. I have to give an eye to Dick's animals as well as my own, because sometimes he feeds them, and sometimes he does not.'

She led the way as she spoke into the back hall, a large stone-paved room, where all the out-door properties and appliances of the family had their abode-guns, fishing-rods, walking-sticks, croquet-mallets, tennis-rackets, and some mysterious objects, the use whereof might be known to Dick but to no one else in the world. Here in a broad VOL. 14.

9

PART 80.

sunny window-seat was a large wicker cage containing a pair of doves. Dagmar took a piece of bread from her apron pocket and began to feed them, and Raymond leaned against the shutter and watched her.

He was well skilled in the art of doing nothing gracefully, and enjoyed it. Sometimes it came over him, with a little thrill that was almost like fear, that he was fast growing to enjoy nothing else.

Though he had never been very energetic in his profession, there had been a time when he had a good deal of energy to bestow upon any piece of business that interested him, or upon the pursuit of pleasure. Now, it seemed to him that there was very little worth the trouble of doing, and that to bask in the sunshine, and not even think more than could be avoided, might be the perfection of earthly wellbeing.

'I must be growing old,' he thought. But a man should not be so very old at five-and-thirty. Day shall make me young again; she

has youth and energy enough for two.'

It is very pleasant here in the sunshine,' he said, lazily. 'I love the I think I should like to go to sleep and dream away the winter, and never wake till May was over and the summer begun again.'

sun.

'I should not. I think it would be dreadful to miss part of one's life. How could you tell what you might miss while you lay dreaming.' 'Not much, judging by what passes while one remains unavoidably awake.'

Dagmar threw the last crumb to the doves and opened the outer door of the stone hall and stepped out into the sunshine, singing under her breath

"Thy steed is dead in his stall, Earl Harold,
Since thou hast been with me;

The rust hath eaten thy harness bright,
And the rats have eaten thy greyhound light

That was so fair and free.'

'No!' she said, as they crossed the wide courtyard, not care for an enchanted garden of perpetual summer. for anything spare the winter out of the year.'

I should

I would not

'Cold and wet and muddy roads!' said Raymond, provokingly. Fog and frost and rain, and long dark evenings! Nothing to do, and no daylight to do it in; not a soul to see, and no spirit to go and see them.'

'White snow and red sunshine,' she answered, smiling defiantly into his face. Short bright days and long starlight nights. Fine days when it is a pleasure to be out, and stormy ones when it is a pleasure only to be indoors, and hear the fire crackle and think how cold and dreary it is outside. Not to speak of berried holly and Christmastime, and all the dear poor folks chuckling over their Christmas

presents.'

'Christmas!' he said, almost bitterly, as they turned into the stable,

and Day brought out a lump of sugar from her pocket and stood stroking her horse's nose while he ate it. 'Christmas! the very fact of that festive season coming in the winter would be enough to make a man hate it.'

Don't you like Christmas?' she asked, with wide eyes of childish wonder.

'Oh, yes! very much,' he answered, with a short laugh. It is so pleasant to sit by a fire alone in your chambers, and study your Christmas bills! There is something so exhilarating in the feeling that you are expected to be in high spirits and to be perfectly amiable and charitable towards every one-even the man in the rooms above, who has got a bachelors' party, who are singing in chorus a song that sounds as if it were "composed and sung by a company of lunatics at full moon." It is so cheering to think of all the people who are, and all the people who are not, enjoying themselves. I declare I don't know which reflection is the most agreeable! And perhaps, even, at the bottom of your heap of bills you find a note from a friend, inviting you to join his family party (which means, since it is Christmas-time, to dine in a scramble along with the children), and wishing you a very Merry Christmas!"

'Should you like Christmas if you could choose your own way of spending it, and your own place to spend it in?' she asked, leading the way into the harness-room.

'Probably not! The human mind rebels against being expected to be happy.'

Your mind does, you mean,' said Dagmar, looking at him compassionately and consideringly. And if you are so bad as that I don't know what is to be done for you.'

Raymond laughed. Nor I either! But what in the world have you got there?'

She was standing by a large wire cage in a dark corner, tapping lightly on the bars, while something within answered with a rustle

and a flutter.

This is my owl-Dick's and mine-Old Plato! He is not lively in the daytime nearly as misanthropical, in fact, as some other philosophers I could mention. But you must see him at night, when Dick has caught him a mouse, and we come and feed him. And here are Dick's rabbits and his guinea-pigs; but he has fed them already, I see. So there is nothing more to look after, but the raven and the old donkey.'

They visited the raven, in a corner of the courtyard, where he was tethered to an object like a hencoop; and Dagmar fed him with the greatest care and circumspection, lest he should take a fancy to a part of her finger. Then they went down the long gravelled pathway to sunny apple orchard, by the fence of which the old donkey, who had carried Day in a pannier when she was a baby, was waiting, expectant of his morning treat.

the

He had all the remaining corn in the basket, and then Day climbed upon the fence and gathered a large apple, and sitting balanced upon the topmost bar, set her white teeth into it with great enjoyment.

Raymond did not love hard and rather unripe apples, nor was he fond of sitting on a rail; but he was not averse to leaning against it in the shade of the apple-trees, and watching his pretty cousin.

There was no sign in her manner of that pleasure in doing something unusual which makes some girls piquant and some objectionable. There was nothing of the romp about her, she had plainly no idea but that all girls lived much the same free pleasant life as hers, and just now her eyes were very grave and full of deep meditation.

'A penny for your thoughts, Day,' said her cousin at last, when the silence had lasted so long as to be a little wearisome.

She smiled, without taking her eyes from that far-off point on the horizon on which they had been fixed, and held out her little sunburnt palm.

He took a penny out of his pocket and laid it in her hand, and she started and looked down upon him.

་

Heads, I will tell you. Tails, I won't,' she said, spinning it in the air with an adroitness that must certainly have been learnt from Dick. Tails! The fates have decided; and doubtless it is for the best. I dare say you would not have understood me.' She dropped the penny into his reluctant hand, and sprang down from her uneasy perch. Come,' she said, 'we are being very idle. Let us go and do some German.'

6

They went in; but Raymond did not find her so amusing as she had been out-of-doors. A lesson was a lesson to Day, and though Raymond gave her plenty of opportunities to turn it from a lesson in German to a lesson in flirtation, she did not seem disposed to profit by them.

Altogether, he was not sorry when the luncheon-bell rang, and his eager young scholar put up her books, and rushed out to the porch to see if she could descry Dick on his way home.

Directly luncheon was over, the whole party prepared to go up to the Court. The Squire went with his wife, volubly explaining to her some improvements and alterations which he meant to persuade Maurice Claughton to make. Dick and Day ran on in front like two children, and Raymond and Agnes were left to walk together. If Agnes felt an unwillingness to accept the small change of 'society talk' from this man who had once been bound to give her of his very best, she was far too much a woman of the world to let it appear. There were no awkward pauses, no gaps of silence, as they walked on together towards the Court, and they talked of the place and the people, of the young owner of the Court who was coming home to his own again, and of other local topics, as if they had no mutual interests or memories but such as Winstead could afford.

The Court was about half a mile from the Hall, standing on the

opposite hillside, in the midst of a real though not extensive park, and backed by beautiful hanging woods of oak and beech.

The Park was beautiful also, full of fine old oak and thorn trees, and picturesquely diversified by tangled thicket and open glade; but the Court, as it stood on a smooth plateau between the Park and the woods, was by no means beautiful, though it might claim to be called stately. Some Claughton, late in King William and Queen Mary's reign, had advised himself to pull down the quaint, rambling old edifice in which he had been born, and to build in its place a huge, square mansion, stuccoed, and painted a light grey, with a balustrade running round its flat roof, adorned at regular intervals by huge vases or urns. The windows were innumerable, and all of the same size and pattern, and the courtyard, with its somewhat more picturesque stables and offices, was carefully concealed at the back, lest anything should break the square monotony.

In the middle of each of the four sides a door-made to look as much like the windows as possible-opened out on to a short double flight of steps. There was no flower-garden to be seen, it was at some distance off, carefully concealed by shrubs; and within sight of the house was nothing but fine old trees and long stretches of turf, somewhat suffering now from years of neglect.

On the same pleateau as the house, and within a few hundred yards of it, stood the parish church, a modest little grey edifice, half smothered in ornamental trees. It was more than a mile from the Vicarage, and from the village, and seemed to have been built chiefly for the convenience of the owners of the Court and their dependents. But it was long since they had made any use of it; for the Claughtons, for many generations past, had been Roman Catholics.

Here, however, the church still stood, its little graveyard full of grey stones trenching upon the Court gardens; and the people passed up through the Park, bold in five centuries' right of way,' to carry on their heretical' worship almost under the very roof of its

owner.

6

When the four elders reached the Court they found Dagmar and her boy companion waiting for them on the steps before the south door. They had already rung the bell, and were parleying with a goodtempered-looking elderly woman who had opened the door; and as the others came up they all passed in together.

The entrance-hall was a fine room, well furnished in an oldfashioned style, with a wide noble fireplace, a long dining-table, and tall screens to keep off the draught from the doors. Beyond was another hall, taking up the centre of the house from top to bottom, lined with oak panelling and hung with family portraits, with galleries running along its sides and oaken stairways climbing from one gallery to another up to the third and last storey.

The pictures were not very interesting, though some were well