. The house had been empty when she was last at
home, and she wondered who inhabited the place now.

Her conjectures, however, were not intently carried on, and she was
watching the light quite idly, when it gradually changed color, and at
length shone blue as sapphire. Thus it remained several minutes, and
then it passed through violet to red.

Her curiosity was so widely awakened by the phenomenon that she sat up
in bed, and stared steadily at the shine. An appearance of this sort,
sufficient to excite attention anywhere, was no less than a marvel in
Hintock, as Grace had known the hamlet. Almost every diurnal and
nocturnal effect in that woodland place had hitherto been the direct
result of the regular terrestrial roll which produced the season's
changes; but here was something dissociated from these normal
sequences, and foreign to local habit and knowledge.

It was about this moment that Grace heard the household below preparing
to retire, the most emphatic noise in the proceeding being that of her
father bolting the doors. Then the stairs creaked, and her father and
mother passed her chamber. The last to come was Grammer Oliver.

Grace slid out of bed, ran across the room, and lifting the latch,
said, "I am not asleep, Grammer. Come in and talk to me."

Before the old woman had entered, Grace was again under the bedclothes.
Grammer set down her candlestick, and seated herself on the edge of
Miss Melbury's coverlet.

"I want you to tell me what light that is I see on the hill-side," said
Grace.

Mrs. Oliver looked across. "Oh, that," she said, "is from the
doctor's. He's often doing things of that sort. Perhaps you don't
know that we've a doctor living here now--Mr. Fitzpiers by name?"

Grace admitted that she had not heard of him.

"Well, then, miss, he's come here to get up a practice. I know him
very well, through going there to help 'em scrub sometimes, which your
father said I might do, if I wanted to, in my spare time. Being a
bachelor-man, he've only a lad in the house. Oh yes, I know him very
well. Sometimes he'll talk to me as if I were his own mother."

"Indeed."

"Yes. 'Grammer,' he said one day, when I asked him why he came here
where there's hardly anybody living, 'I'll tell you why I came here. I
took a map, and I marked on it where Dr. Jones's practice ends to the
north of this district, and where Mr. Taylor's ends on the south, and
little Jimmy Green's on the east, and s