ternoon post and
reached Robinette Loring at breakfast next morning.

III

YOUNG MRS. LORING

Young Mrs. Loring thought she had never taken so long a drive as that
from the Weston railway station to Stoke Revel. The way stretched
through narrow winding roads, always up hill, always between high
Devonshire hedges. The rain-soaked lanes were slippery and she was
unpleasantly conscious of the size and weight of the American wardrobe
trunk that reared its mighty frame in front of her almost to the
blotting-out of the driver, who steadied it with one hand as he plied
the whip with the other. It struck her humorously that the trunk was
larger than most of the cottages they were passing.

It was a late spring that year in England,--Robinette was a new-comer
and did not know that England runs to late and wet springs, believing
that they make more conversation than early, fine ones,--and the
trees were just bursting into leaf. The sun had not shone for three
days and the landscape, for all its beautiful greenness, looked gloomy
to an eye accustomed to a good deal of crude sunshine.

As the horse mounted higher and higher Robinette glanced out of the
windows at the dripping boughs and her face lost something of its
sparkle of anticipation. She had little to expect in the way of a warm
welcome, she knew that; or at least her mind knew it, but Robinette's
heart always expected surprises, although she had lived two and twenty
summers and was a widow at that.

Her mother had been a de Tracy of Stoke Revel whose connection with
that ancient family had ceased abruptly when she met an American
architect while traveling on the Continent, married him out of hand
and went to his native New England with him. The de Tracys had no
opinion of America, its government, its institutions, its customs, or
its people, and when they learned that Cynthia de Tracy had not only
allied herself with this undesirable nation, but had selected a native
by the name of Harold Bean, they regarded the incident of the marriage
as closed.

The union had been a happy one, though the de Tracys of Stoke Revel
had always regarded the unfortunately named architect more as a
vegetable than a human being; and the daughter of the marriage was the
young Mrs. Loring now driving in the station fly to the home of her
mother's people.

Her father had died when she was fifteen and her mother followed three
years after, leaving her with a respectable fortune b