t walled
garden, at whose antiquities Hector Garret laughed.

Leslie played sad pranks in the early season of her disenthralment. She
wandered far and near, and soiled her white gowns, to the despair of the
Otter servant who did up the master's shirts and managed the mistress's
clear-starching, but who never dreamt, in those days of frills, robes,
and flounces, of styling herself a laundress. Leslie filled her apron
with mosses and lichens: she stole out after the reapers had left the
patch of oats which was not within sight of the house, and gathered
among the sheaves like a Ruth. She grew stout and hardy, and, in spite
of her gipsy bonnet, as brown as a berry under this out-of-door life,
until no one would have known the waxen-faced city girl; and many a time
when Hector Garret left his study in the dusk and found his way to the
drawing-room, he discovered her asleep from very weariness, with her
head laid down on her spindle-legged work-table, and the white moonbeams
trying to steal under her long eyelashes. He would tread softly, and
stand, and gaze, but he never stooped and kissed her cheek in merry
frolic, never in yearning tenderness.

Such was Leslie's holiday; let her have it--it ended, certainly. The
black October winds began to whistle in the chimneys and lash the Otter
sea into foam; the morning mists were white and dense on the hills, and
sometimes the curtain never rose the whole day; the burns were hoarse
and muddy, the sheep in fold, the little birds silent. Leslie loved the
prospect still, even the wild grey clouds rent and whirled across the
sky, the watery sun, and the ragged, wan, dripping verdure; but it made
her shiver too, and turn to her fireside, where she would doze and yawn,
work and get weary in her long solitary hours. Hector Garret was patient
and good-humoured; he took the trouble to teach her any knowledge to
which she aspired; but he was so far beyond her, so hopelessly superior,
that she was vexed and ashamed to confess to him her ignorance, and it
was clear that when he came up to her domain in the evening he liked
best to rest himself, or to play with her in a fondling, toying way.
After the first interminable rainy day which she had spent by herself at
Otter, when he entered and proceeded in his cool, rather lazy fashion to
tap her under the chin, to inquire if she had been counting the rain
drops, to bid her try his cigar, she felt something swelling in her
throat, and answered him