thinking of some one who was gone, and of some one who was to come. Dwelling among the old memories of Mitchelhurst Place, her girlish thoughts had turned to them for lack of other food, till the Rothwells were real to her in a sense in which no other fancies ever could be real. She was so conscious that her connection with the house was accidental and temporary, that she felt as if it still belonged to its old owners, and she was only their guest. They were always near, yet, whimsically enough, in point of time they were nearest when they were most remote. Barbara's phantoms mostly belonged to the last century, and they faded and grew pale as they approached the present day, till the latest owner of the Place was merely a name. The truth was that at the end of their reign the Rothwells, impoverished and lonely, had simply lived in the house as they found it, and were unable to set the stamp of any individual tastes upon their surroundings. They were the Rothwells of the good old times who left their autographs in the books in the library, their patient needlework on quilts and bell-pulls, their mouldering rose-leaves in great china jars, their pictures still hanging on the walls, and traces of their preferences in the names of rooms and paths. There were inscriptions under the bells that had summoned servants long ago, which told of busy times and a full house. The lettering only differed from anything in the present day by being subtly and unobtrusively old-fashioned. "Mr. Gerald" and "Mr. Thomas" had given up ringing bells for many a long day, and if the one suspended above Miss Sarah's name sometimes tinkled through the stillness, it was only because Barbara wanted some hot water. Miss Sarah was one of the most distinct of the girl's phantoms. Rightly or wrongly, Barbara always believed her to be the beautiful Miss Rothwell of whom an old man in the village told her a tradition, told to him in his boyhood. It seemed that a Rothwell of some uncertain date stood for the county ("and pretty nigh ruined himself," said her informant, with a grim, yet admiring, enjoyment of the extravagant folly of the contest), and in the very heat of the election Miss Rothwell drove with four horses to the polling-place, to show herself clothed from head to foot in a startling splendour of yellow, her father's colour.

"They said she was a rare sight to see," the old man concluded meditatively.

"And did Mr. Rothwell get in?" asked Barbara.

"No, no!" he said, shaking his head. "No Rothwell ever got in for the county, though they tried times. But he pretty nigh ruined himself."

Had she cared to ask her uncle, Barbara might very possibly have ascertained the precise date of the election, and identified the darkly beautiful girl who was whirled by her four spirited horses into the roaring, decorated town. But she was not inclined to talk of her fancies to Mr. Hayes. So, assuming the heroine to be Miss Sarah, she remained in utter ignorance concerning her after life. Did she ever wear the white robes of a bride, or the blackness of widow's weeds? Barbara often wondered. But at night, in her room, which was Sarah Rothwell's, she could never picture her otherwise than superbly defiant in the meteor-like glory of that one day.

As she brushed her dusky cloud of hair that evening she called up the splendour of her favourite vision, and then her thoughts fell sadly away from it to Reynold Harding, the man who had kindred blood in his veins, but no inheritance of name or land. Those iron horse-hoofs, long ago, had thundered over the bit of road where Barbara gathered her autumn nosegay, and where young Harding—oh, poor fellow!—slipped in the mire, and scrambled awkwardly to his feet, a pitiful, sullen figure to put beside the beautiful Miss Rothwell.

Was she glad he was coming? She laid down her brush and mused, looking into the depths of her mirror. Yes, she was glad. She did not think she should like him. She felt that he was hostile, scornful, dissatisfied. But Mitchelhurst was quiet—so few people ever came to it, and if they did come they went away without a word—and at eighteen quiet is wearisome, and a spice of antagonism is refreshing. Did he hate her as her uncle had said? Time would show. She took her little cross from the dressing table, and looked at it with a new interest. No, she did not like him. "But, after all," said Barbara to herself, "he is a Rothwell, and my fairy godmother introduced us!"

Many miles away a bunch of hips, scarlet and orange, lay by a scribbled paper. They had had adventures since they were pulled from a Mitchelhurst brier that afternoon. They had been lost and found, and travelling by rail had nearly been lost again. A clumsy porter, shouldering a load, had blundered against an absorbed young man, who was just grasping a rhyme; and the red berries fell between them to the dusty platform, and were barely saved from perils of hurrying feet. Still, though a little bruised and spoilt, they glowed ruddily in the candle-light, and the paper beside them said—

"Speech was forbidden me; I could but stay,
Ambushed behind a leafless hawthorn screen,
And look upon her passing. She had been
To pluck red berries on that autumn day,
And Love, who from her side will never stray,
Stole some for pity, seeing me unseen,
And sighing, let them fall, that I might glean—
'Poor gift,' quoth he, 'that Time shall take away!'
Nay, but I mock at Time! It shall not be
That, fleet of foot, he robs me of my prize;
Her smile has kindled all the sullen skies,
Blessed the dull furrows, and the leafless tree,
And year by year the autumn, ere it dies,
Shall bring my rosy treasure back to me!"

CHAPTER III.
"WELCOME TO MITCHELHURST PLACE."

Mitchelhurst was, as Mr. Hayes had said, a dull little village, by no means likely to attract visitors. It was merely a group of houses, for the most part meanly built, set in a haphazard fashion on either side of a wide road. Occasionally a shed would come to the front, or two or three poplars, or a bit of garden fence. But the poplars were apt to be mercilessly lopped, with just a tuft at the extreme tip, which gave each unlucky tree a slight resemblance to a lion's tail, and the gardens, if not full of cabbages, displayed melancholy rows of stumps where cabbages had been. There was very little traffic through Mitchelhurst Street, as this thoroughfare was usually called, yet it showed certain signs of life. Fowls rambled aimlessly about it, with a dejected yet inquiring air, which seemed to say that they would long ago have given up their desultory pecking if they could have found anything else to do. A windmill, standing on a slight eminence a little way from the road, creaked as its sails revolved. Sounds of hammering came from the blacksmith's forge. Children played on the foot-path, a little knot of loungers might generally be seen in front of the "Rothwell Arms," and at most of the doorways stood the Mitchelhurst women, talking loudly while their busy fingers were plaiting straws. This miserably paid work was much in vogue in the village, where generation after generation of children learned it, and grew up into stunted, ill-fed girls, fond of coarse gossip, and of their slatternly independence.