chimneys and gables nestling in ivy. An infinite repose had been laid
upon the landscape with the withdrawal of the fog, as of a veil lifted
from the face of a sleeper. All his boyish dreams of the mother country
came back to him in the books he had read, and re-peopled the vast
silence. Even the rotting leaves that lay thick in the crypt-like woods
seemed to him the dead laurels of its past heroes and sages. Quaint
old-time villages, thatched roofs, the ever-recurring square towers of
church or hall, the trim, ordered parks, tiny streams crossed by heavy
stone bridges much too large for them--all these were only pages of
those books whose leaves he seemed to be turning over. Two hours of this
fancy, and then the train stopped at a station within a mile or two of
a bleak headland, a beacon, and the gray wash of a pewter-colored sea,
where a hilly village street climbed to a Norman church tower and the
ivied gables of a rectory.
Miss Eversleigh, dignifiedly tall, but youthfully frank, as he
remembered her, was waiting to drive him in a pony trap to the rectory.
A little pink, with suppressed consciousness and the responsibilities of
presenting a stranger guest to her guardian, she seemed to Randolph more
charming than ever.
But her first word of news shocked and held him breathless. Bobby, the
little orphan, a frail exotic, had succumbed to the Northern winter. A
cold caught in New York had developed into pneumonia, and he died on the
passage. Miss Avondale, although she had received marked attention from
Sir William, returned to America in the same ship.
"I really don't think she was quite as devoted to the poor child as all
that, you know," she continued with innocent frankness, "and Cousin Bill
was certainly most kind to them both, yet there really seemed to be some
coolness between them after the child's death. But," she added suddenly,
for the first time observing her companion's evident distress, and
coloring in confusion, "I beg your pardon--I've been horribly rude and
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