“Perhaps some other evening while he is here you will be able to come up,” said Mrs. Trelyon in her gentle way.  “You know you ought to come and see how your pupil is getting on.  He writes me such nice letters now; and I fancy he is working very hard at his studies, though he says nothing about it.”

“I am very glad to hear that,” Wenna said in a low voice.

Trelyon did come to the Hall for a few days, but he kept away from the village, and was seen by no one of the Rosewarnes.  But on the Christmas morning, Mabyn Rosewarne, being early about, was told that Mrs. Trelyon’s groom wished to see her, and, going down, she found the man, with a basket before him.

“Please, miss, Mr. Trelyon’s compliments, and would you take the flowers out of the cotton-wool and give them to Miss Rosewarne?”

“Oh, won’t I?” said Mabyn, opening the basket at once, and carefully getting out a bouquet of camellias, snowdrops and sweet violets.  “Just you wait a minute, Jakes, for I’ve got a Christmas-box for you.”

Mabyn went up stairs as rapidly as was consistent with the safety of the flowers, and burst into her sister’s room:  “Oh, Wenna, look at this!  Do you know who sent them?  Did you ever see anything so lovely?”

For a second the girl seemed almost frightened; then her eyes grew troubled and moist, and she turned her head away.  Mabyn put them gently down and left the room without a word.

The Christmas and the New Year passed without any message from Mr. Roscorla; and Mabyn, though she rebelled against the bondage in which her sister was placed, was glad that she was not disturbed by angry letters.  About the middle of January, however, a brief note arrived from Jamaica.

“I cannot let such a time go by,” Mr. Roscorla wrote, “whatever may be our relations, without sending you a friendly word.  I do hope the new year will bring you health and happiness, and that we shall in time forget the angry manner in which we parted and all the circumstances leading to it.”

She wrote as brief a note in reply, at the end of which she hoped he would forgive her for any pain he had suffered through her.  Mabyn was rejoiced to find that the correspondence—­whether it was or was not meant on his part to be an offer of reconciliation—­stopped there.

And again the slow days went by until the world began to stir with the new spring-time—­the saddest time of the year to those who live much in the past.  Wenna was out and about a great deal, being continually busy, but she no longer took those long walks by herself in which she used to chat to the butterflies and the young lambs and the sea-gulls.  The fresh western breezes no longer caused her spirits to flow over in careless gayety:  she saw the new flowers springing out of the earth, but it was of another spring-time she was thinking.