At Crewe both alighted, Arnold to stretch his legs for a moment.

“By the bye,” he said, as Miss Derwent, having seen to her luggage, was bidding him farewell, “I’m sorry to hear that young Otway has been very ill.”

“Ill?—­I had no knowledge of it.  In Russia?”

“Yes.  My father was speaking of it yesterday.  He had heard it from his friend, old Mr. Otway.  A fever of some kind.  He’s all right again, I believe.”

“We have heard nothing of it.  There’s your whistle.  Good-bye!”

Jacks leapt into his train, waved a hand from the window, and was whirled away.

For the rest of her journey, Irene seemed occupied with an alternation of grave and amusing thoughts.  At moments she looked seriously troubled.  This passed, and the arrival found her bright as ever; the pink of modern maidenhood, fancy free.

The relatives she was visiting were two elderly ladies, cousins of her mother; representatives of a family native to this locality for hundreds of years.  One of the two had been married, but husband and child were long since dead; the other, devoted to sisterly affection, had shared in the brief happiness of the wife and remained the solace of the widow’s latter years.  They were in circumstances of simple security, living as honoured gentlewomen, without display as without embarrassment; fulfiling cheerfully the natural duties of their position, but seeking no influence beyond the homely limits; their life a humanising example, a centre of charity and peace.  The house they dwelt in came to them from their yeoman ancestors of long ago; it was held on a lease of one thousand years from near the end of the sixteenth century, “at a quit-rent of one shilling,” and certain pieces of furniture still in use were contemporary with the beginning of the tenure.  No corner of England more safely rural; beyond sound of railway whistle, bosomed in great old elms, amid wide meadows and generous tillage; sloping westward to the river Dee, and from its soft green hills descrying the mountains of Wales.

Here in the old churchyard lay Irene’s mother.  She died in London, but Dr. Derwent wished her to rest by the home of her childhood, where Irene, too, as a little maid, had spent many a summer holiday.  Over the grave stood a simple slab of marble, white as the soul of her it commemorated, graven thereon a name, parentage, dates of birth and death—­no more.  Irene’s father cared not to tell the world how that bereavement left him.

Round about were many kindred tombs, the most noticeable that of Mrs. Derwent’s grandfather, a ripe old scholar, who rested from his mellow meditations just before the century began.

“GULIELMI W——­
Pii, docti, integri,
Reliquiae seu potius exuviae.”