ed on that dreadful ride."

Miss Eunice frowned slightly, and merely remarking, "Very well, bring
him in, though I caution you against Sir Philip. He is old and
irritable," led the way through the wide hall into a sitting-room
beyond, where a wood fire was burning on the hearth, and the furnishings
were of the sort in vogue a hundred years ago. Even the disturbed young
visitor thought she had never seen anything so charming as that simple
interior, where everything was in keeping, and so spotlessly neat, and
over which fell the cheerful radiance of the blazing logs.
Unceremoniously dropping Punch, she clasped her hands in admiration,
exclaiming:

"Oh, how quaint! How interesting! How unlike anything I expected to
see!"

Although Miss Eunice was gratified by this tribute to her familiar
surroundings, she fancied that its expression was overdone, and resented
its seemingly patronizing insincerity. Placing a chair directly in the
glow of the fire, she invited Katharine to take it, while she herself
sat down on a straight-backed settle beyond.

Sensitive to feel the lessening cordiality of her hostess's manner,
Katharine hid her feeling behind an added flippancy, as she tossed her
palms outward, in a manner wholly natural to herself, but which the
house-mistress again fancied an affectation, and exclaimed: "Well!"

"Well?" returned Miss Eunice, quietly but inquiringly.

"Well, I suppose you're the legatee and I'm the legacy. I hope you won't
be half as unwilling to accept me as I am to be left to you. If you are,
there'll be some high times in Marsden."

This mixture of frankness and bravado brought a second frown to Miss
Maitland's fine face, but she said, quite courteously:

"Kindly explain, my child, who you are, and to what I am indebted--"

"For the nuisance of your legacy," interrupted the girl, excitedly, and,
thrusting a sealed letter into the other's hand, drew back in her own
chair and covered her face with her hands. Under all her self-confident
manner her heart was throbbing painfully, and she felt as if she must
get up and run away. Somewhere in the great forest through which Reuben
had driven his coach lay an apparently deserted little cabin, which had
attracted her by its overgrowth of woodbine--that hereabout seemed to
envelop everything upon which it could clasp its tendrils--and whose
memory now returned to her invitingly. Exiled from her own home, an
alien here, such a spot as that would be a ha