“How curious it is,” said Maud, “to see a place of which one knows every inch laid out like a map beneath one.  It seems quite a different place!  As if something beautiful and strange must be happening there, if only one could see it!”

“Yes,” said Howard, “it is odd how we lose the feeling that a place is romantic when we come to know it.  When I first went up to Cambridge, there were many places there that seemed to me to be so interesting:  walls which seemed to hide gardens full of thickets, strange doorways by which no one ever passed out or in, barred windows giving upon dark courts, out of which no one ever seemed to look.  But now that I know them all from the inside, they seem commonplace enough.  The hidden garden is a place where Dons smoke and play bowls; the barred window is an undergraduate’s gyp-room; there’s no mystery left about them now.  This place as I see it to-day—­well, it seems the most romantic place in the world, full of unutterable secrets of life and death; but I suppose it may all come to wear a perfectly natural air to me some day.”

“That is what I like so much about Cousin Anne,” said Maud; “nothing seems to be commonplace to her, and she puts back the mystery and wonder into it all.  One must learn to do that for oneself somehow.”

“Yes, she’s a great woman!” said Howard; “but what shall we do now?”

“Oh, I am sorry,” said Maud, “I have been keeping you all this time—­wouldn’t you like to go and look for Jack?  I think I heard a shot just now up the valley.”

“No,” said Howard, looking at her and smiling, “we won’t go and look for Jack to-day; he has quite enough of my company.  I want your company to-day, and only yours.  I want to get used to my new-found cousin.”

“And to get rid of the sense of romance about her?” said Maud with a smile; “you will soon come to the end of me.”

“I will take my chance of that,” said Howard.  “At present I feel on the other side of the wall.”

“But I don’t,” said Maud, laughing; “I can’t think how you slip in and fit in as you do, and disentangle all our little puzzles as you have done.  I thought I should be terrified of you—­and now I feel as if I had known you ever so long.  You are like Cousin Anne, you know.”

“Perhaps I am, a little,” said Howard, “but you are not very much like Jack!  Show me Mrs. Darby’s house, by the way.  I wonder how things are going.”

“There it is,” said Maud, pointing to a house not far from the Vicarage, “and there is Dr. Grierson’s dogcart.  I am afraid I had not been thinking about her; but I do hope it’s all right.  I think she will get over this.  Don’t you always have an idea, when people are ill, whether they will get well or not?”

“Yes,” said Howard, “I do; but it doesn’t always come right!”

They lingered long on the hill, and at last Maud said that she must return for tea.  “Papa will be sure to bring Dr. Grierson in.”