The windows in them were new, the doors fresh painted and closely
shut; curtains of some soft outlandish make showed themselves in
what had once been a stable, and the turf stretched smoothly up to
a narrow gravelled path in front of them, unbroken by a single
footmark. No, evidently the old farm, for such it undoubtedly was,
had been but lately, or comparatively lately, transformed to new
and softer uses; that rough patriarchal life of which it had once
been a symbol and centre no longer bustled and clattered through
it. It had become the shelter of new ideals, the home of another
and a milder race than once possessed it.

In a stranger coming upon the house for the first time, on this
particular evening, the sense of a changing social order and a
vanishing past produced by the slight but significant modifications
it had undergone, would have been greatly quickened by certain
sounds which were streaming out on to the evening air from one of
the divisions of that long one-storied addition to the main dwelling
we have already described. Some indefatigable musician inside was
practising the violin with surprising energy and vigor, and within
the little garden the distant murmur of the river and the gentle
breathing of the West wind round the fell were entirely conquered
and banished by these triumphant shakes and turns, or by the
flourishes and the broad _cantabile_ passages of one of Spohr's
Andantes. For a while, as the sun sank lower and lower toward the
Shanmoor hills, the hidden artist had it all his, or her, own way;
the valley and its green spaces seemed to be possessed by this
stream of eddying sound, and no other sign of life broke the gray
quiet of the house. But at last, just as the golden ball touched
the summit of the craggy fell, which makes the western boundary of
the dale at its higher end, the house-door opened, and a young girl,