larches and the sycamores. Never had she so given her heart to any new
world; and through her delight flashed the sorest, tenderest thoughts of
her father. "Oh! papa--oh, papa!" she said to herself again and again in
a little moan. Every day perhaps he had walked this road as a child, and
she could still see herself as a child, in a very dim vision, trotting
beside him down the Browhead Road. She turned at last into the fell-gate
to which a passing boy directed her, with a long breath that was almost a
sob.

She had given them no notice; but surely, surely they would be glad to
see her!

_They_? She tried to split up the notion, to imagine the three people she
was going to see. Cousin Elizabeth--the mother? Ah! she knew her, for
they had never liked Cousin Elizabeth. She herself could dimly remember a
hard face; an obstinate voice raised in discussion with her father. Yet
it was Cousin Elizabeth who was the Fountain born, who had carried the
little family property as her dowry to her husband James Mason. For the
grandfather had been free to leave it as he chose, and on the death of
his eldest son--who had settled at the farm after his marriage, and taken
the heavy work of it off his father's shoulders--the old man had
passionately preferred to leave it to the strong, capable granddaughter,
who was already provided with a lover, who understood the land, moreover,
and could earn and "addle" as he did, rather than to his bookish milksop
of a second son, so richly provided for already, in his father's
contemptuous opinion, by the small government post at Newcastle.

"Let us always thank God, Laura, that my grandfather was a brute to
yours!" Stephen Fountain would say to his girl on the rare occasions when
he could be induced to speak of his family at all. "But for that I might