a cider store-room. Above these on
the first-floor were three pleasant rooms overlooking the garden, and
opening on to a wooden gallery or verandah, at each end of which was an
alcove of an old-fashioned and substantial description.

The gallery was roofed above, had a heavy oaken balustrade, and being
fully ten feet wide afforded a convenient place in which the lonely old
lady could take exercise, for, excepting on Sunday, she was scarcely
ever known to leave her own premises. There also her little
great-grandson Peter first learned to walk, and as she slowly passed
from one alcove to the other, resting in each when she reached it, he
would take hold of her high staff and totter beside her, always
bestowing on her as much as he could of his company, and early showing a
preference for her over his aunt and even over his mother.

Up and down the gallery this strange pair would move together, and as
she went she gazed frequently over the gay wilderness below, and if she
sat long in one of the alcoves, she would peer out at its little window
always on the same scene; a scene in the winter of hopeless neglect and
desolation. Dead leaves, dead dry stalks of foxgloves and mullens.
broken branches, and an arbour with trellised roof, borne down by the
weight of the vine.

But in spring and summer the place was gorgeous in parts with a confused
tangle of plants and shrubs in flower. Persian lilacs, syringas,
labernums made thickets here and there and covered their heads with
bloom. Passion flowers trailed their long tendrils all over the gallery,
and masses of snow-white clematis towered in many of the trees.

All distinction between pathway and border had long since been
obliterated, the eyes wandered over a carpet of starred and spangled
greenery. Tall white gladiolas shot up above it, and spires of foxgloves
and rockets, while all about them and among the rose-trees, climbed the
morning glory and the briony vine.

Stretching in front of the ruined arbour was a lawn, and along one edge
of it under the wall, grew a bed of lilies, lilies of the valley, so
sweet in their season, that sometimes the old lady's grand-daughters
would affirm that a waft of their breath had reached them as they sat up
in the gallery at work.

It was towards this spot that Madam Melcombe looked. Here her unquiet
face was frequently turned, from her first early entrance into the
gallery, till sunset, when she would sit in one of the alcoves in hot