-light.

Mrs. Heron and Janet exchanged looks. Janet was smiling, but the
housekeeper's face wore a puzzled expression; her new mistress
bewildered her.

The worthy soul could make nothing of these sudden changes; first a
tiny woman rustling in silks, and holding her head like a little
queen, with a plaintive voice speaking sweet words of welcome; then a
pale, tired lady peering into corners and averse to shadows; and now,
nothing but a pretty child rocking herself to and fro with a kitten in
her arms. No wonder Mrs. Heron shook her head rather gravely as she
left the room.

"What on earth will my master do with a child like that?" she thought;
"she will not be more of a companion to him than that kitten--but
there, he knows his own business best, and she is a pretty creature."
But all the same, Mrs. Heron still shook her head at intervals, for
all the household knew that Margaret Ferrers, the sister of the blind
vicar of Sandycliffe, was to have come to the Hall as its mistress;
and the housekeeper's faithful eyes had already noticed the cloud on
her master's brow.

"'Marry in haste and repent at leisure,' that is what many a man has
done to his cost," she soliloquized, as she bustled about her
comfortable room. "Well, she is a bonny child, and he's bound to make
her happy; she will be like a bit of sunshine in the old Hall if he
does not damp her cheerfulness with his gloomy moods."

A little while afterward, Ellerton met his little mistress wandering
about the Hall, and ushered her into the damask drawing-room. Fay was
looking for her husband.

She had escaped from Janet, and had been seeking him some time,
opening doors and stumbling into endless passages, but always making
her way back somehow to the focus of light--the big hall; and feeling
drearily as though she were some forlorn princess shut up in an
enchanted castle, who could not find her prince.

She wanted to feel his arms round her, and sob out all her
strangeness; and now an ogre in the shape of the gray-haired butler
had shut her up in a great, brilliantly lighted room, where the tiny,
white woman saw herself reflected in the long mirrors.

Fay, standing dejected and pale in the center of the room, felt like
Beauty in the Beast's palace, and was dreaming out the story in her
odd childish way, when the door was flung suddenly open, and the
prince, in the person of Sir Hugh, made his appearance.

She ran toward him with a little cry; but someth