tombs and headstones many beautiful blossoming trees rose from the
long green grass. The laburnum glowed in the June afternoon
sunlight; the lilac, the hawthorn and the clustering meadowsweet
which fringed the edge of the lazy stream mingled their heavy
sweetness in sleepy fragrance. The yellow-grey crumbling walls were
green in places with wrinkled harts-tongues, and were topped with
sweet-williams and spreading house-leek and stone-crop and wild-
flowers whose delicious sweetness made for the drowsy repose of
perfect summer.

But amid all that mass of glowing colour the two young figures seated
on the grey old tomb stood out conspicuously. The man was in
conventional hunting-dress: red coat, white stock, black hat, white
breeches, and top-boots. The girl was one of the richest, most
glowing, and yet withal daintiest figures the eye of man could linger
on. She was in riding-habit of hunting scarlet cloth; her black hat
was tipped forward by piled-up masses red-golden hair. Round her
neck was a white lawn scarf in the fashion of a man's hunting-stock,
close fitting, and sinking into a gold-buttoned waistcoat of snowy
twill. As she sat with the long skirt across her left arm her tiny
black top-boots appeared underneath. Her gauntleted gloves were of
white buckskin; her riding-whip was plaited of white leather, topped
with ivory and banded with gold.

Even in her fourteenth year Miss Stephen Norman gave promise of
striking beauty; beauty of a rarely composite character. In her the
various elements of her race seemed to have cropped out. The firm-
set jaw, with chin broader and more square than is usual in a woman,
and the wide fine forehead and aquiline nose marked the high descent
from Saxon through Norman. The glorious mass of red hair, of the