d like to live in a large house, with many people
all smiling and talking around me. And everybody worships you."

She uttered the last words shyly, partly afraid of bringing a frown on
the lovely face opposite to her, which was quickly losing its vivid
expression and sinking back into statuesque coldness.

"It is simply weariness to me and vexation of spirit," she answered. "If
I could be quite alone, as you are, with only a father like yours, I
think I could get free; but I have never been left alone from my
babyhood; just as Felix and Hilda are never left alone. Oh, Phebe, you
do not know how happy you are."

"No," she said cheerfully, "sometimes when I stand at our garden-gate,
and look round me for miles and miles away, and the sweet air blows past
me, and the bees are humming, and the birds calling to one another, and
everything is so peaceful, with father happy over his work not far off,
I think I don't know how happy I am. I try to catch hold of the feeling
and keep it, but it slips away somehow. Only I thank God I am happy."

"I was never happy enough to thank God," Felicita murmured, lying back
in her seat and shutting her eyes. Presently the children returned, and,
after another silent row, slower and more toilsome, as it was up the
river, they drew near home again, and saw Madame's anxious face watching
for them over the low garden wall. Her heart had been too heavy for her
to join them in their pleasure-taking, and it was no lighter now.

CHAPTER IV.

UPFOLD FARM.

Phebe rode slowly homeward in the dusk of the evening, her brain too
busy with the varied events of the day for her to be in any haste to
reach the end. For the last four miles her road lay in long by-lanes,
shady with high hedgerows and trees which grew less frequent and more
stunted as she rose gradually higher up the long spurs of the hills,
whose rounded outlines showed dark against the clear orange tint of the
western sky. She could hear the brown cattle chewing the cud, and the
bleating of some solitary sheep on the open moor, calling to the flock
from which it had strayed during the daytime, with the angry yelping of
a dog in answer to its cry from some distant farm-yard. The air was
fresh and chilly with dew, and the low wind, which only lifted the
branches of the trees a little in the lower land she had left, was
growing keener, and would blow sharply enough across the unsheltered
table-land she was reaching. But still she