On the following morning—­it was Friday—­Lady Honoria, accompanied by Anne, departed in the very best of tempers.  For the next three weeks, at any rate, she would be free from the galling associations of straightened means—­free to enjoy the luxury and refined comfort to which she had been accustomed, and for which her soul yearned with a fierce longing that would be incomprehensible to folk of a simpler mind.  Everybody has his or her ideal Heaven, if only one could fathom it.  Some would choose a sublimated intellectual leisure, made happy by the best literature of all the planets; some a model state (with themselves as presidents), in which (through their beneficent efforts) the latest radical notions could actually be persuaded to work to everybody’s satisfaction; others a happy hunting ground, where the game enjoyed the fun as much as they did; and so on, ad infinitum.

Lady Honoria was even more modest.  Give her a well appointed town and country house, a few powdered footmen, plenty of carriages, and other needful things, including of course the entree to the upper celestial ten, and she would ask no more from age to age.  Let us hope that she will get it one day.  It would hurt nobody, and she is sure to find plenty of people of her own way of thinking—­that is, if this world supplies the raw material.

She embraced Effie with enthusiasm, and her husband with a chastened warmth, and went, a pious prayer on her lips that she might never again set eyes upon Bryngelly.

It will not be necessary for us to follow Lady Honoria in her travels.  That afternoon Effie and her father had great fun.  They packed up.  Geoffrey, who was rapidly recovering from his stiffness, pushed the things into the portmanteaus and Effie jumped on them.  Those which would not go in they bundled loose into the fly, till that vehicle looked like an old clothes ship.  Then, as there was no room left for them inside, they walked down to the Vicarage by the beach, a distance of about three-quarters of a mile, stopping on their way to admire the beautiful castle, in one corner of which Owen Davies lived and moved.

“Oh, daddy,” said the child, “I wish you would buy a house like that for you and me to live in.  Why don’t you, daddy?”

“Haven’t got the money, dear,” he answered.

“Will you ever have the money, daddy?”

“I don’t know, dear, perhaps one day—­when I am too old to enjoy it,” he added to himself.

“It would take a great many pennies to buy a house like that, wouldn’t it, daddy?” said Effie sagely.

“Yes, dear, more than you could count,” he answered, and the conversation dropped.

Presently they came to a boat-shed, placed opposite the village and close to high-water mark.  Here a man, it was old Edward, was engaged in mending a canoe.  Geoffrey glanced at it and saw that it was the identical canoe out of which he had so nearly been drowned.