These had been very pleasant days, and their lingering memories came hovering round Grace as she stood once again among the familiar haunts, after an absence of years.  Echoes of merry ringing tones, in which her own mingled, seemed to resound through the wooded paths, where only the parching wind whistled shrilly to-day, and a boyish voice seemed still to call impatiently under the lozenge-paned window of the old school-room, “Gracie, Gracie, are you not done with lessons yet?  Do come out and play.”  And how dreary “Noel and Chapsal” used to grow all of a sudden when that invitation came, and with what relentless slowness the hands of the old clock dragged through the lesson-hour still to run.

But the quaint old window has the shutters on it now, and the eager face that used to seek his caged playmate through its bars is looking out on new lands from his wandering home at sea.  The little girl, too, who used to sit in the dim school-room seems to hear other voices calling to her this afternoon.

And while Grace stands hesitating whether, after all, it might be wise to go into the garden to hear what old Adam has to say before she proceeded to the high road, we shall try to find what earnest quest sent her out this afternoon, in spite of her old nurse’s remonstrances and the east wind.

Grace Campbell’s father and mother died when she was very young, and since then her home had been with her aunt.  For the last few years Miss Hume had been so infirm that she did not feel able to undertake the journey to Kirklands, a small property in the north of Scotland, which she inherited from her father.  Her winter home was Edinburgh, and Miss Hume for some years had only ventured on a short journey to the nearest watering-place, while her country home stood silent and deserted, with only the ancient gardener and his wife wandering about through the darkened rooms and the old garden, with its laden fruit-trees and its flowers run to seed.  But, to Grace’s great delight, her aunt had announced some months before that if she felt strong enough for the journey, she meant to go to Kirklands early in the spring.  It seemed as if in her fading autumnal time she longed to see the familiar woods and dells of her childhood’s home grow green again with returning life.  So the darkened rooms had been opened to the sun again, and on the day before our story begins, some of the former inmates had taken possession of them.

The three years during which Grace had been absent from Kirklands had proved very eventful to her in many ways.  There had been some changes in her outer life.  Walter, her only brother and playmate, had left home to go to sea.  They had only had one passing visit from him since, so changed in his midshipman’s dress, with his broadened shoulders and bronzed face, and so full of sailor life and talk, that his playmate had hardly composure of mind to discover till he was gone that the same loving heart still beat under the blue dress and bright buttons.  And while she thought of him with a new pride, she felt an undercurrent of sadness in the consciousness that the pleasant threads of daily intercourse had been broken, and the old childish playfellow had passed away.