ved, how different the
history of Europe would have been from what we know it to-day."

I could almost have kissed her ladyship of my own accord, so pleased was
I to get away. I made my curtsey to her, and also to Sister Agnes, whose
only reply was a sweet, sad smile, and managed to preserve my dignity
till I was out of the room. But when the door was safely closed behind
me, I ran, I flew along the passages till I reached the housekeeper's
room. Dance was not there, neither had candles yet been lighted. The
bright moonlight pouring in through the window gave me a new idea.

I had not yet been down to look at the river! What time could be better
than the present one for such a purpose? I had heard some of the elder
girls at Park Hill talk of the delights of boating by moonlight. Boating
in the present case was out of the question, but there was the river
itself to be seen. Taking my hat and scarf, I let myself out by a side
door, and then sped away across the park like a hunted fawn, not
forgetting to take an occasional bite at her ladyship's pear. To-night,
for a wonder, my mind seemed purged of all those strange fears and
stranger fancies engendered in it, some people would say, by
superstition, while others would hold that they were merely the effects
of a delicate nervous organisation and over-excitable brain re-acting
one upon the other. Be that as it may, for this night they had left me,
and I skipped on my way as fearlessly as though I were walking at
mid-day, and with a glorious sense of freedom working within me, such,
only in a more intense degree, as I had often felt on our rare holidays
at school.

There was a right of public footpath across one corner of the park.
Tracking this narrow white ribbon through the greensward, I came at
length to a stile which admitted me into the high road. Exactly opposite
was a second stile, opening on a second footpath, which I felt sure
could lead to nowhere but the river. Nor was I mistaken. In another five
minutes I was on the banks of the Adair.

To my child's eye, the scene was one of exquisite beauty. To-day, I
should probably call it flat and wanting in variety. The equable
full-flowing river was lighted up by a full and unclouded moon. The
undergrowth that fringed its banks was silver-foliaged; silver-white
rose the mists in the meadows. Silence everywhere, save for the low
liquid murmur of the river itself, which seemed burdened with some love
secret, centuries o