Great preparations were accordingly made.  Billy Tatham’s successor (his son)—­in his best open carriage —­was drawn up at the station, and Lucy’s drive through the village with some of her numerous boxes covered with foreign labels piled on the seat beside the young man—­who insisted on driving Lucy and the child himself—­was more like the arrival of a princess revisiting her estates than anything else.  Martha and Archie and Jane filled the carriage, with little Ellen on Archie’s lap, and more than one neighbor ran out of the house and waved to them as they drove through the long village street and turned into the gate.

Archie threw his arms around Lucy when he saw her, and in his open, impetuous way called her his “dear aunty,” telling her how glad he was that she had come to keep his good mother from getting so sad at times, and adding that she and granny had not slept for days before she came, so eager were they to see her.  And Lucy kissed him in return, but with a different throb at her heart.  She felt a thrill when she saw how handsome and strong he was, and for an instant there flashed through her a feeling of pride that he was her own flesh and blood.  Then there had come a sudden revulsion, strangling every emotion but the one of aversion—­an aversion so overpowering that she turned suddenly and catching Ellen in her arms kissed her with so lavish a display of affection that those at the station who witnessed the episode had only praise for the mother’s devotion.  Jane saw the kiss Lucy had given Archie, and a cry of joy welled up in her heart, but she lost the shadow that followed.  My lady of Paris was too tactful for that.

Her old room was all ready.  Jane, with Martha helping, had spent days in its preparation.  White dimity curtains starched stiff as a petticoat had been hung at the windows; a new lace cover spread on the little mahogany, brass-mounted dressing-table—­ her great grandmother’s, in fact—­with its tiny swinging mirror and the two drawers (Martha remembered when her bairn was just high enough to look into the mirror), and pots of fresh flowers placed on the long table on which her hooks used to rest.  Two easy-chairs had also been brought up from the sitting-room below, covered with new chintz and tied with blue ribbons, and, more wonderful still, a candle -box had been covered with cretonne and studded with brass tacks by the aid of Martha’s stiff fingers that her bairn might have a place in which to put her dainty shoes and slippers.

When the trunks had been carried upstairs and Martha with her own hands had opened my lady’s gorgeous blue morocco dressing-case with its bottles capped with gold and its brushes and fittings emblazoned with cupids swinging in garlands of roses, the poor woman’s astonishment knew no bounds.  The many scents and perfumes, the dainty boxes, big and little, holding various powders—­one a red paste which the old nurse thought must be a salve, but about which, it is needless to say, she was greatly mistaken—­as well as a rabbit’s foot smirched with rouge (this she determined to wash at once), and a tiny box of court-plaster cut in half moons.  So many things, in fact, did the dear old nurse pull from this wonderful bag that the modest little bureau could not hold half of them, and the big table had to be brought up and swept of its plants and belongings.