arge of her.

Lady Maulevrier never accompanied her granddaughters on these occasions.
She was a vigorous old woman, straight as a dart, slim as a girl, active
in her degree as any young athlete among those hills, and she declared
that she never felt the need of change of air. The sodden shrubberies,
the falling leaves, did her no harm. Never within the memory of this
generation had she left Fellside. Her love of this mountain retreat was
a kind of _culte_. She had come here broken spirited, perhaps broken
hearted, bringing her dead husband from the little inn at Great Langdale
forty years ago, and she had hardly left the spot since that day.

In those days Fellside House was a very different kind of dwelling from
the gracious modern Tudor mansion which now crowned and beautified the
hill-side above Grasmere Lake. It was then an old rambling stone house,
with queer little rooms and inconvenient passages, low ceilings,
thatched gables, and all manner of strange nooks and corners. Lady
Maulevrier was of too strictly conservative a temper to think of
pulling down an old house which had been in her husband's family for
generations. She left the original cottage undisturbed, and built her
new house at right angles with it, connecting the two with a wide
passage below and a handsome corridor above, so that access should be
perfect in the event of her requiring the accommodation of the old
quaint, low ceiled rooms for her family or her guests. During forty
years no such necessity had ever arisen; but the old house, known as the
south wing, was still left intact, the original furniture undisturbed,
although the only occupants of the building were her ladyship's faithful
old house-steward, James Steadman, and his elderly wife.

The house which Lady Maulevrier had built for herself and her
grandchildren had not been created all at once, though the nucleus
dating forty years back was a handsome building. She had added more
rooms as necessity or fancy dictated, now a library with bedrooms over
it, now a music room for Lady Lesbia and her grand piano--anon a
billiard-room, as an agreeable surprise for Maulevrier when he came home
after a tour in America. Thus the house had grown into a long low pile
of Tudor masonry--steep gables, heavily mullioned casements, grey stone
walls, curtained with the rich growth of passion-flower, magnolia,
clematis, myrtle and roses--and all those flowers which thrive and
flourish in that mild and she