ngs. But every detail of what she saw pleased the girl's
taste, and satisfied her heart. All the while she was comparing it with
other scenes and another landscape, amid which she had lived till now--a
monotonous blue sea, mountains scorched and crumbled by the sun, dry
palms in hot gardens, roads choked with dust and tormented with a plague
of motor-cars, white villas crowded among high walls, a wilderness of
hotels, and everywhere a chattering unlovely crowd.

"Thank goodness!--that's done with," she thought--only to fall into a
sudden remorse. "Papa--papa!--if you were only here too!"

She pressed her hands to her eyes, which were moist with sudden tears.
But the happiness in her heart overcame the pang, sharp and real as it
was. Oh! how blessed to have done with the Riviera, and its hybrid empty
life, for good and all!--how blessed even, to have done with the Alps
and Italy!--how blessed, above all, to have come _home!_--home into the
heart of this English land--warm mother-heart, into which she, stranger
and orphan, might creep and be at rest.

The eloquence of her own thoughts possessed her. They flowed on in a
warm, mute rhetoric, till suddenly the Comic Spirit was there, and
patriotic rapture began to see itself. She, the wanderer, the exile,
what did she know of England--or England of her? What did she know of
this village even, this valley in which she had pitched her tent? She
had taken an old house, because it had pleased her fancy, because it had
Tudor gables, pretty panelling, and a sundial. But what natural link had
she with it, or with these peasants and countrymen? She had no true
roots here. What she had done was mere whim and caprice. She was an
alien, like anybody else--like the new men and prowling millionaires,
who bought old English properties, moved thereto by a feeling which was
none the less snobbish because it was also sentimental.

She drew herself up--rebelling hotly--yet not seeing how to disentangle
herself from these associates. And she was still struggling to put
herself back in the romantic mood, and to see herself and her experiment
anew in the romantic light, when her maid knocked at the door, and
distraction entered with letters, and a cup of tea.

* * * * *

An hour later Miss Mallory left her room behind her, and went tripping
down the broad oak staircase of Beechcote Manor.

By this time romance was uppermost again, and self-congratulation. She