n I left the cottage and
walked quickly up the road that led to the vicarage.

My busy day had not tired me, and I should have enjoyed a solitary ramble
in spite of the wet roads and dark November sky, only I knew Uncle Max
would be waiting for me. A keen sense of independence, of liberty, of
congenial work in prospective, seemed to tingle in my veins, as though
new life were coursing through them. I was no longer trammelled by the
constant efforts to move in other people's grooves. I was free to think
my own thought and lead my own life without reproof or hindrance.

The vicarage was a red, irregular house, shut off from the road by
a low wall, with a court-yard planted somewhat thickly with shrubs: the
living-rooms were chiefly at the back of the house, and their windows
looked out on a pleasant garden: a glass door in the hall opened on a
broad gravel terrace bordered by standard rose-trees, and beyond lay a
smooth green lawn almost as level as a bowling-green; a laurel hedge
divided it from an extensive kitchen-garden, to which Uncle Max and Mr.
Tudor devoted a great deal of their spare time and superfluous energies.

It was far too large a house for an unmarried man: the broad staircase
and spacious rooms seemed to require the echo of children's voices. Uncle
Max used to call it the barracks, but I think in his heart he liked the
roomy emptiness; when he was restless he would prowl up and down the wide
landing from one unused room to another. It was an old-fashioned house,
and more than one generation had grown up in it. Uncle Max was fond of
telling me about his predecessors' histories. Two little children had
died in the big nursery overlooking the garden. There was a little brown
room where a _ci-devant_ vicar had written his sermons, with a big
cupboard in the wall where he hung his cassock. He had a grown-up family,
but his wife was dead. One day he married again and brought home a slim,
pale-faced girl--a certain Priscilla Howe--to be the mistress of his
house. There were stories rife in the village that her step-children were
too much for poor, pretty Priscilla; that while her husband wrote his
sermons in the little brown room the young wife pined and moped in her
green sitting-room.

Uncle Max found a picture of her one day in a garret where they stored
apples; a faint musty smell clung to the canvas. 'Priscilla Howe' was
written in one corner; there was a childish look on the small oval face;
large mela