ing one! The house seemed so tiny and so suffocating
after the splendid halls and huge rooms at Glencardine, while her aunt's
constant sarcasm about her father--whom she had not seen for eight
years--was particularly galling.

The woman treated the girl as a wayward child sent there for punishment
and correction. She showed her neither kindness nor consideration; for,
truth to tell, it annoyed her to think that her brother should have
imposed the girl upon her. She hated to be bothered with the girl; but,
existing upon Sir Henry's charity, as she really did, though none knew
it, she could do no otherwise than accept his daughter as her guest.

Days, weeks, months had passed, each day dragging on as its predecessor,
a wretched, hopeless, despairing existence to a girl so full of life and
vitality as Gabrielle. Though she had written several times to her
father, he had sent her no reply. To her mother at San Remo she had also
written, and from her had received one letter, cold and unresponsive.
From Walter Murie nothing--not a single word.

The well-thumbed books in the village library she had read, as well as
those in the possession of her aunt. She had tried needlework, problems
of patience, and the translation of a few chapters of an Italian novel
into English in order to occupy her time. But those hours when she was
alone in her little upstairs room with the sloping roof passed, alas! so
very slowly.

Upon her, ever oppressive, were thoughts of that bitter past. At one
staggering blow she had lost all that had made her young life worth
living--her father's esteem and her lover's love. She was innocent,
entirely innocent, of the terrible allegations against her, and yet she
was so utterly defenceless!

Often she sat at her little window for hours watching the lethargy of
village life in the street below, that rural life in which the rector
and the schoolmaster were the principal figures. The dullness of it all
was maddening. Her aunt's mid-Victorian primness, her snappishness
towards the trembling maid, and the thousand and one rules of her daily
life irritated her and jarred upon her nerves.

So, in order to kill time, and at the same time to study the antiquities
of the neighbourhood--her father having taught her so much deep
antiquarian knowledge--it had been her habit for three months past to
take long walks for many miles across the country, accompanied by the
black collie Rover belonging to a young farmer w