to pack up, which no one but himself could do to his satisfaction.  Besides, was Margaret one to give way before strange men, or even household friends like the cook and Charlotte!  Not she.  But at last the four packers went into the kitchen to their tea; and Margaret moved stiffly and slowly away from the place in the hall where she had been standing so long, out through the bare echoing drawing-room, into the twilight of an early November evening.  There was a filmy veil of soft dull mist obscuring, but not hiding, all objects, giving them a lilac hue, for the sun had not yet fully set; a robin was singing,—­perhaps, Margaret thought, the very robin that her father had so often talked of as his winter pet, and for which he had made, with his own hands, a kind of robin-house by his study-window.  The leaves were more gorgeous than ever; the first touch of frost would lay them all low on the ground.  Already one or two kept constantly floating down, amber and golden in the low slanting sun-rays.

Margaret went along the walk under the pear-tree wall.  She had never been along it since she paced it at Henry Lennox’s side.  Here, at this bed of thyme, he began to speak of what she must not think of now.  Her eyes were on that late-blowing rose as she was trying to answer; and she had caught the idea of the vivid beauty of the feathery leaves of the carrots in the very middle of his last sentence.  Only a fortnight ago And all so changed!  Where was he now?  In London,—­going through the old round; dining with the old Harley Street set, or with gayer young friends of his own.  Even now, while she walked sadly through that damp and drear garden in the dusk, with everything falling and fading, and turning to decay around her, he might be gladly putting away his law-books after a day of satisfactory toil, and freshening himself up, as he had told her he often did, by a run in the Temple Gardens, taking in the while the grand inarticulate mighty roar of tens of thousands of busy men, nigh at hand, but not seen, and catching ever, at his quick turns, glimpses of the lights of the city coming up out of the depths of the river.  He had often spoken to Margaret of these hasty walks, snatched in the intervals between study and dinner.  At his best times and in his best moods had he spoken of them; and the thought of them had struck upon her fancy.  Here there was no sound.  The robin had gone away into the vast stillness of night.  Now and then, a cottage door in the distance was opened and shut, as if to admit the tired labourer to his home; but that sounded very far away.  A stealthy, creeping, cranching sound among the crisp fallen leaves of the forest, beyond the garden, seemed almost close at hand.  Margaret knew it was some poacher.  Sitting up in her bed-room this past autumn, with the light of her candle extinguished, and purely revelling in the solemn beauty of the heavens and the earth, she had many a time seen the light noiseless leap of