ce, in spite of her aloofness, was not at all unpopular.
She always had work, too, because she could be trusted with anything.

So that very night I said to Elsie: "Let's have it out with Nance about
your people. Your grandfather is as rich as can be. There may be
money in it, and my father says you should never let that go a-begging.
Besides you ought to know about your father and mother. It is only
respectable if you are asked."

"Oh, I know all that," said Elsie, mightily unmoved, "my mother married
her cousin and her father was angry. She ran away. My grandfather can
keep his old money. Who wants it? Not I! I am happier with Nance."

This was very well, but if Elsie was not curious, I was. So I cooed
and besought round Nance Edgar that night, till at last she told us
everything in her little kitchen, after the tea dishes had been washed
up and the coal fire was beginning to catch--the flame paying bo-peep
with the bars, and every now and then coming brightly out in a
triumphant jet of light, unexpected like a cuckoo clock, shining on
Elsie's yellow hair and Nance's calm, tired face as she told us the
story--

"Breckonside was not a big place twenty years ago (she said), even less
than it is now, but there is one house that is a-wanting. That was
your grandfather's house, Elsie, him they call the Golden Farmer, that
lives now at the Grange in Deep Moat Hollow.

"It was up yonder beyond the church, and in the summer mornings the
tombstones were blithe to see, glinting rosy-coloured with the dew on
them, and the long, well-nourished grass hiding the inscriptions. Now
you may go up the burnside to the turn of the road where the kirkburn
runs bonnie and clear down the hill. The heather and the breckon grow
there together, and that they say gave its name to the
village--Breckonside. At any rate, there where stood your
grandfather's cottage--he was a poor man then--ye will see a kind of
knowe or hillock, greener than the rest. But of the house not one
stone is left upon another. The kindly mould is over all. The hemlock
and the foxglove, what we used to call 'bloody fingers,' grow tall and
red where lovers whispered cannily by the ingle nook, and of all that
well-set garden plot where Hobby the Miser--that is now Mr. Howard
Stennis--grew his weaving lint and dibbled his cabbages, only a single
lilac bush looks over the corner of the broken-down dyke as you pass by!

"But at that time it was a heartsom