to perform. The task involved on such charmed winter days almost
as much delighted loitering about the different quarters of her
demesne as if spring were already at work on shrubs and borders.
There were such inexhaustible possibilities still before her,
such opportunities to bring out the latent graces of the old
place, without a single irreverent touch of alteration, that the
winter months were all too short to plan what spring and autumn
executed. And her recovered sense of safety gave, on this
particular morning, a peculiar zest to her progress through the
sweet, still place. She went first to the kitchen-garden, where
the espaliered pear-trees drew complicated patterns on the walls,
and pigeons were fluttering and preening about the silvery-slated
roof of their cot. There was something wrong about the piping of
the hothouse, and she was expecting an authority from Dorchester,
who was to drive out between trains and make a diagnosis of the
boiler. But when she dipped into the damp heat of the
greenhouses, among the spiced scents and waxy pinks and reds of
old-fashioned exotics,--even the flora of Lyng was in the note!--
she learned that the great man had not arrived, and the day being
too rare to waste in an artificial atmosphere, she came out again
and paced slowly along the springy turf of the bowling-green to
the gardens behind the house. At their farther end rose a grass
terrace, commanding, over the fish-pond and the yew hedges, a
view of the long house-front, with its twisted chimney-stacks and
the blue shadows of its roof angles, all drenched in the pale
gold moisture of the air.

Seen thus, across the level tracery of the yews, under the
suffused, mild light, it sent her, from its open windows and
hospitably smoking chimneys, the look of some warm human