carefully-trimmed square
bushes of yew stood next to the house, and beyond the church the lane
dipped to the river and the cottage.

Stella went from room to room. She had furnished the cottage simply and
daintily; the walls were bright, her servant-girl had gathered flowers
and set them about. Outside the window the sunlight shone on a green
garden. She was alone. It was the home-coming she had wished for.

For three or four months she was left alone; and then one afternoon as
she came into the cottage after a walk she found a little white card upon
the table. It bore the name of Mr. Hazlewood.

CHAPTER XIV

THE HAZLEWOODS

In the quiet country town obvious changes had taken place during the
eight years of Stella's absence. They were not changes of importance,
however, and one sentence can symbolize them all--there was now tarmac
upon its roads. But in the cluster of houses a mile away at the end of
the deep lane the case was different. Mr. Harold Hazlewood had come to
Little Beeding. He now lived in the big house to which the village owed
its name and indeed its existence. He lived--and spread consternation
amongst the gentry for miles round.

"Lord, how I wish poor Arthur hadn't died!" old John Chubble used to
cry. He had hunted the West Sussex hounds for thirty years and the very
name of Little Beeding turned his red face purple. "There was a man. But
this fellow! And to think he's got that beautiful house! Do you know
there's hardly a pheasant on the place. And I've hashed them down out of
the sky in the old days there by the dozen. Well, he's got a son in the
Coldstream, Dick Hazlewood, who's not so bad. But Harold! Oh, pass me
the port!"

Harold indeed had inherited Little Beeding by an accident during the
first summer after Stella had gone out to India. Arthur Hazlewood, the
owner and Harold's nephew, had been lost with his yacht in a gale of wind
off the coast of Portugal. Arthur was a bachelor and thus Harold
Hazlewood came quite unexpectedly into the position of a country squire
when he was already well on in middle age. He was a widower and a man of
a noticeable aspect. At the first glance you knew that he was not as
other men; at the second you suspected that he took a pride in his
dissimilarity. He was long, rather shambling in his gait, with a mild
blue eye and fair thin hair now growing grey. But length was the chief
impression left by his physical appearance. His legs, his arms, his face