visitors at Normanthorpe.

"And did he do so?" inquired Rachel, looking with interest into her own
eyes in the glass. "Did he leave him to your master?"

"He did that!" replied her maid, a simple Yorkshire wench, whom Rachel
herself had chosen in preference to the smart town type. "Catch any on
'em not doin what master tells them!"

"Then did John see what happened?"

"No, m'm--because master sent him to see if the chap'd come in at t'
lodge gates, or where, and when he got back he was gone, blanket an'
all, an' master with him."

"Blanket and all!" repeated Rachel. "Do you mean to say he had the
impudence to bring a blanket with him?"

"And slept in it!" cried her excited little maid. "John says he found
him tucked up in a corner of the lawn, out of the wind, behind some o'
them shrubs, sound asleep, and lapped round and round in his blue
banket from head to heel."

Rachel saw her own face change in the glass; but she only asked one more
question, and that with a smile.

"Did John say it was a blue blanket, Harris, or did your own imagination
supply the color?"

"He said it, m'm; faded blue."

"And pray when did you see John to hear all this?" demanded Rachel,
suddenly remembering her responsibility as mistress of this young
daughter of the soil.

"Deary me, m'm," responded the ingenuous Harris, "I didn't see him, not
more than any of the others; he just comed to t' window of t' servants'
hall, as we were having our breakfasts, and he told us all at once. He
was that full of it, was John!"

Rachel asked no more questions; but she was not altogether sorry that
the matter had already become one of common gossip throughout the house.
Meanwhile she made no allusion to it at breakfast, but her observation
had been quickened by the events of the morning, and thus it was that
she noticed and recognized the narrow blue book which was too long for
her husband's breast-pocket, and would show itself as he stooped over
his coffee. It was his check-book, and Rachel had not seen it since
their travels.

That afternoon a not infrequent visitor arrived on his bicycle, to which
was tied a bouquet of glorious roses instead of a lamp; this was Charles
Langholm, the novelist, who had come to live in Delverton, over two
hundred miles from his life-long haunts and the literary market-place,
chiefly because upon a happy-go-lucky tour through the district he had
chanced upon what he never tired of calling "the ideal rose-cov