Yes, Mr. Thomas Wellin, whose death had thrown the farm which she had now taken on the market, had done well for the land.  And it was not his fault but the landlord’s that the farmhouse and buildings had been allowed to fall into such a state.  Mr. Wellin had not wanted the house, since he was only working the land temporarily in addition to his own farm half a mile away.  But the owner, Colonel Shepherd, ought to have looked after the farmhouse and buildings better.  Still, they were making her a fair allowance for repairs.

She was longing to know how the workmen from Millsboro had been getting on.  Hastings, the Wellins’ former bailiff, now temporarily hers, had promised to stay behind that evening to meet her at the farm.  She only meant to insist on what was absolutely necessary.  Even if she had wished for anything more, the lack of labour would have prevented it.

The old horse jogged on, and presently from a row of limes beside the road, a wave of fragrance, evanescent and delicious, passed over the carriage.  Miss Henderson sniffed it with delight.  “But one has never enough of it!” she thought discontentedly.  And then she remembered how as a child—­in far-away Sussex—­she used to press her face into the lime-blossom in her uncle’s garden—­passionately, greedily, trying to get from it a greater pleasure than it would ever yield.  For the more she tried to compel it, by a kind of violence, the more it escaped her.  She used to envy the bees lying drunk among the blooms.  They at least were surfeited and satisfied.

It struck her that there was a kind of parable in it of her whole life—­so far.

But now there was a new world opening.  The past was behind her.  She drew herself stiffly erect, conscious through every limb of youth and strength, and filled with a multitude of vague hopes.  Conscious, too, of the three thousand pounds that Uncle Robert had so opportunely left her.  She had never realized that money could make so much difference; and she thought gratefully of the elderly bachelor, her mother’s brother, who had unexpectedly remembered her.  It had enabled her to get her year’s training, and to take this farm with a proper margin of capital.  She wished she had been able to tell Uncle Robert before he died what it meant to her.

They passed one or two pairs of labourers going home, then a group of girls in overalls, then a spring cart containing four workmen behind a ragged pony, no doubt the builder’s men who had been at work on the Great End repairs.  They all looked at her curiously, and Rachel Henderson looked back at them—­steadily, without shyness.  They were evidently aware of who she was and where she was going.  Some of them perhaps would soon be in her employ.  She would be settling all that in a week or two.