She rode unto the knacker’s yard,
      And tirled at the pin: 
   Right glad were then the cat’s-meat men
      To let that lady in!

—­especially, Lobelia, when she alighted and sat upon the ground and began to tell them sad stories of the death of kings.  But they cut off Sentry-go’s head and nailed it over the gate.  So he died, and she very imprudently married the master knacker, who had heard she was an heiress in her own right, and wanted to decorate his coat-of-arms with an escutcheon of pretence; and besides, his doctor had recommended a complete change “—­

“Law, miss, how you do run on!”

The young lady who had given utterance to this amazing rigmarole stood at the top of a terrace flight (much cracked and broken) between two leaden statuettes (headless)—­a willowy child in a large-brimmed hat, with a riding-switch in one hand and the other holding up an old tartan shawl, which she had pinned about her to imitate a horse-woman’s habit.  As she paced to and fro between the leaden statuettes—­

pedes vestis defluxit ad imos
Et vera incessu patuit dea,

—­and I noted almost at once that two or three butterflies ("red admirals” they were) floated and circled about her in the sunlight.  A child of commoner make, and perhaps a year older, dressed in a buff print frock and pink sunbonnet, looked up at her from the foot of the steps.  The faces of both were averted, and I stood there for at least a minute on the verge of the laurels, unobserved, considering the picture they made, and the ruinous Jacobean house that formed its background.

Never was house more eloquent of desolation.  Unpainted shutters, cracking in the heat, blocked one half of its windows.  Weather-stains ran down the slates from the lantern on the main roof.  The lantern over the stable had lost its vane, and the stable-clock its minute-hand.  The very nails had dropped out of the gable wall, and the wistaria and Gloire de Dijons they should have supported trailed down in tangles, like curtains.  Grass choked the rain-pipes, and moss dappled the gravel walk.  In the border at my feet someone had attempted a clearance of the weeds; and here lay his hoe, matted with bindweed and ring-streaked with the silvery tracks of snails.

“Very well, Lobelia.  We will be sensible house-maid and cook, and talk of business.  We came out, I believe, to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-pie”—­

At this point happening to turn her head she caught sight of me, and stopped with a slight, embarrassed laugh.  I raised my hat.

“I beg your pardon, sir, but no strangers are admitted here.”

“I beg your pardon”—­I began; and with that, as I shifted my walking-stick, my foolish ankle gave way, and plump I sat in the very middle of the bindweed.

“You are ill?” She came quickly towards me, but halted a pace or two off.  “You look as if you were going to faint.”