wall, beyond which lay the farm buildings
and offices; so that people could come in this
way to my lady on business, while, if she
were going into the garden from her own
room, she had nothing to do but to pass
through Mrs. Medlicott's apartment, out into
the lesser hall, and then turning to the right
as she passed on to the terrace, she could go
down the flight of broad, shallow steps at the
corner of the house into the lovely garden,
stretching, sweeping lawns, and gay flowerbeds,
and beautiful, bossy laurels, and other
blooming or massy shrubs, with full-grown
beeches, or larches feathering down to the
ground a little farther off. The whole was
set in a frame, as it were, by the more distant
woodlands. The house had been modernised
in the days of Queen Anne, I think; but the
money had fallen short that was requisite to
carry out all the improvements, so it was
only the suite of withdrawing-rooms and the
terrace-rooms, as far as the private entrance,
that had the new, long, high windows put in,
and these were old enough by this time
to be draped with roses, and honeysuckles,
and pyracanthus, winter and summer long.

Well, to go back to that day when I
limped into my lady's sitting-room, trying
hard to look as if I had not been crying,
and not to walk as if I was in much pain. I
do not know whether my lady saw how
near my tears were to my eyes, but she
told me she had sent for me, because she
wanted some help in arranging the drawers
of her bureau, and asked me—just as if it
was a favour I was to do her—if I could sit
down in the easy chair near the window—
(all quietly arranged before I came in, with a
footstool, and a table quite near) and assist
her. You will wonder, perhaps, why I was
not bidden to sit or lie on the sofa; but
(although I found one there a morning or two
afterwards, when I came down) the fact was,
that there was none in the room at this time.
I have even fancied that the easy chair was
brought in on purpose for me; for it was not
the chair in which I remembered my lady
sitting the first time I saw her. That chair
was very much curved and gilded, with a
countess' coronet at the top. I tried it one
day, some time afterwards, when my lady
was out of the room, and I had a fancy for
seeing how I could move about, and very
uncomfortable it was. Now my chair (as I
learnt to call it, and to think it,) was soft and
luxurious, and seemed somehow to give one's
body rest just in that part when one most
needed it.

I was not at my ease that first day, nor
indeed for many days afterwards,
notwithstanding my chair was so comfortable. Yet
I forgot my sad pain in silently wondering
over the meaning of many of the things we
turned out of those curious, old drawers. I
was puzzled to know why some were kept at
all; a scrap of writing may-be, with only
lialf-a-dozeu common-place words written
on it, or a bit of broken riding- whip, and
here and there a stone, of which I thought I
could have picked up twenty just as good in
the first walk I took. But it seems that was
just my ignorance; for my lady told me they
were pieces of valuable marble, used to make
the floors of the great Roman emperors'
palaces long ago; and that when she had been
a girl, and made the grand tour long ago, her
cousin, Sir Horace Mann, the Ambassador or
Envoy at Florence, had told her to be sure to
go into the fields inside the walls of ancient
Rome, when the farmers were preparing the
ground for the onion sowing, and had to
make the soil fine, and pick up what bits of
marble she could find. She had done so,
and meant to have had them made into a,
table; but somehow that plan fell through,
and there they were with all the dirt out of
the onion-field upon them; but once when I
thought of clearing them with soap and water,
at any rate, she bade me not to do so, for it
was Roman dirt earth, I think, she called it
—but it was dirt all the same.

Then, in this bureau, were many other
things, the value of which I could understand
—locks of hair carefully ticketed, which my
lady looked at very sadly; and lockets
and bracelets with miniatures in them,—
very small pictures to what they make
now-a-days, and call miniatures; some of
them had even to be looked at through a
miscroscope before you could see the
individual expression of the faces, or how
beautifully they were painted. I don't think that
looking at these made my lady seem so
melancholy, as the seeing and touching of the hair
did. But, to be sure, the hair was, as it were,
a part of some beloved body which she might
never touch and caress again, but which lay
beneath the turf, all faded and disfigured,
except perhaps the very hair, from which the
lock she held had been dissevered; whereas
the pictures were but pictures after all—
likenesses, but not the very things themselves.
This is only my own conjecture, mind. My
lady rarely spoke out her feelings. For, to
begin with, she was of rank; and I have
heard her say that people of rank do not
talk about their feelings except to their
equals, and even to them they conceal them,
except upon rare occasions. Secondly,—and
this is my own reflection,—she was an only
child and an heiress; and as such was more
apt to think than to talk, as all well-brought-up
heiresses must be, I think. Thirdly, she had
long been a widow, without any companion
of her own age with whom it would have
been natural for her to refer to old
associations, past pleasures, or mutual
sorrows. Mrs. Medlicott came nearest to her
as a companion of this sort; and her
ladyship talked more to Mrs. Medlicott, in a
kind of familiar way, than she did to all
the rest of the household put together. But
Mrs. Medlicott was silent by nature, and did.
not reply at any great length. Adams,