aw only such changes
as advancing intelligence and growing friendships made. The real
change was in Aspatria personally. No one could have traced without
constant doubt the slim, virginal, unfinished-looking girl that left
Seat-Ambar, in the womanly perfection of Aspatria aged twenty-four
years. She had grown several inches taller; her angles had all
disappeared; every joint was softly rounded. Her hands and arms were
exquisite; her throat and the poise of her head like those of a Greek
goddess. Her hair was darker and more abundant, and her eyes retained
all their old charm, with some rarer and nobler addition.

To be sure, she had not the perfect regularity of feature that
distinguished some of her associates, that exact beauty which Titian's
Venus possesses, and which makes no man's heart beat a throb the
faster. Her face had rather the mobile irregularity of Leonardo's Mona
Lisa, the charming face that men love passionately, the face that men
can die for.

At the close of the third year she refused all invitations for the
summer holidays, and went back to Seat-Ambar. There had not been much
communication between Will and herself. He was occupied with his land
and his sheep, his wife and his two babies. People then took each
other's affection as a matter of course, without the daily assurance
of it. About twice a year Will had sent her a few strong words of
love, and a bare description of any change about the home, or else
Alice had covered a sheet with pretty nothings, written in the small,
pointed, flowing characters then fashionable.

But the love of Aspatria for her home depended on no such trivial,
accidental tokens. It was in her blood; her personality was knotted to
Seat-Ambar by centuries of inherited affection; she could test it by
the fact that it would have killed her to see it pass into a
stranger's hands. When once she had turned her face northward, it
seemed impossible to travel quickly enough. Hundreds of miles away she
felt the cool wind blowing through the garden, and the scent of the
damask rose was on it. She heard the gurgling of the becks and the
wayside streams, and the whistling of the boys in the barn, and the
tinkling of the sheep-bells on the highest fells. The raspberries were
ripe in their sunny corner; she tasted them afar off. The dark oak
rooms, their perfume of ancient things, their air of homelike
comfort,--it was all so vivid, so present to her memory, that her
heart beat and thr