his side; but in about ten minutes the baronet and his companion would
grow tired of the rustling limes and the still water, hidden under the
spreading leaves of the water-lilies, and the long green vista with the
broken well at the end, and would stroll back to the drawing-room, where
my lady played dreamy melodies by Beethoven and Mendelssohn till her
husband fell asleep in his easy-chair.

Sir Michael Audley was fifty-six years of age, and he had married a
second wife three months after his fifty-fifth birthday. He was a big
man, tall and stout, with a deep, sonorous voice, handsome black eyes,
and a white beard--a white beard which made him look venerable against
his will, for he was as active as a boy, and one of the hardest riders
in the country. For seventeen years he had been a widower with an only
child, a daughter, Alicia Audley, now eighteen, and by no means too well
pleased at having a step-mother brought home to the Court; for Miss
Alicia had reigned supreme in her father's house since her earliest
childhood, and had carried the keys, and jingled them in the pockets of
her silk aprons, and lost them in the shrubbery, and dropped them into
the pond, and given all manner of trouble about them from the hour in
which she entered her teens, and had, on that account, deluded herself
into the sincere belief, that for the whole of that period, she had been
keeping the house.

But Miss Alicia's day was over; and now, when she asked anything of the
housekeeper, the housekeeper would tell her that she would speak to my
lady, or she would consult my lady, and if my lady pleased it should be
done. So the baronet's daughter, who was an excellent horsewoman and a
very clever artist, spent most of her time out of doors, riding about
the green lanes, and sketching the cottage children, and the plow-boys,
and the cattle, and all manner of animal life that came in her way. She