the house to reach the lawn.

"Always in good time, Bessie Carnegie," said she. "But is not your
mother coming?"

"No, thank you, Mrs. Wiley," said Bessie with prim decorum.

"By the by, that is not your name. What is your name, Bessie?"

"Elizabeth Fairfax."

"Ah! yes; now I remember--Elizabeth Fairfax. And is your uncle pretty
well? I suppose we shall see him later in the day? He ought to look in
upon us before we break up. There! run away to the children in the
orchard, and leave the lawn clear."

Bessie accepted her dismissal gladly, thankful to escape the
catechetical ordeal that would have ensued had there been leisure for
it. She was almost as shy of the rector's wife as of the rector. Mrs.
Wiley had a brusque, absent manner, and it was a trick of hers to expose
her young acquaintance to a fire of questions, of which she as regularly
forgot the answers. She had often affronted Bessie Fairfax by asking her
real name, and in the next breath calling her affably Bessie Carnegie,
the doctor's step-daughter, niece or other little kinswoman whom he kept
as a help in his house for charity's sake.

Bessie had but faint recollections of the rectory as her home, for since
her father's death she had never gone there except as a visitor on
public days. But the tradition was always in her memory that once she
had lived in those pleasant rooms, had run up and down those broad sunny