and sold the plantations, and mean to settle down in Old
England now, with you for my little housekeeper in course of time. After
all, there's no country like one's own, and whatever attractions one
finds abroad, one is always longing for a whiff of one's native air."

As I write these last lines I look out through the mullioned window over
the quaint old-world garden to a line of golden sand and a distant
streak of silver sea, for my wildest dreams are realized: Father has
taken Wyngates, and the deserted house, where Cathy and I wandered on
that spring morning, is now my home. The large fireplaces blaze with the
most hospitable of log fires; the clipped yew hedges are neatly trimmed;
the beds are gay with flowers, and I have planted a border of white
lilies round the sun-dial in the ladies' pleasaunce. Philippa Lovell's
room is my special sanctum, where I keep my books and my work, and her
laughing face smiles down upon me as if she were glad that young life
has returned to the old place once more. The Winstanleys are our dearest
friends, and very few days pass without a meeting between us. Cathy and
I have just left school, and I am settling down in dead earnest to
master the mysteries of housekeeping, and to supply to my father that
dear place which my mother left empty long ago. We do not want to
fritter away our lives in that aimless fashion which girls sometimes do
when school-days are over, and we have many plans for our own and the
village improvement. Strange to say, Edward, just through college, is
here at one with us. He has forgotten his dandy ways, and his drawl, and
is the foremost in organizing a Boys' Brigade, or running a
reading-room, qualifying, as Dick irreverently puts it, for a
"thorough-going out-and-out kind of a parson chap". George is at sea,
and, from the accounts of his adventures, the ringleader of a lively
crew of harum-scarum middies, whose escapades outrival even the pranks
which he and Dick played long ago. His great desire seems to be that a
war should break out to give him an opportunity of displaying his
courage.

I love Wyngates with my whole heart; no spot on earth seems more
beautiful to me, and I would not change its hills and its fresh breezes
for all the brightness of southern skies. Our old home and all its
associations are not forgotten, however, for Juanita, now married to
Pedro, sends us kindly messages from her orange-farm on the sierras, and
Tasso, whose devotion to my f