Up at the Manor, however, the lights were not yet extinguished.  Maryllia, on the departure of ‘Ambassador Josey’ as she had called him, and his two convoys, had sent for Mrs. Spruce and had gone very closely with her into certain matters connected with Mr. Oliver Leach.  It had been difficult work,—­for Mrs. Spruce’s garrulity, combined with her habit of wandering from the immediate point of discussion, and her anxiety to avoid involving herself or her husband in trouble, had created a chaotic confusion in her mind, which somewhat interfered with the lucidity of her statements.  Little by little, however, Maryllia extracted a sufficient number of facts from her hesitating and reluctant evidence to gain considerable information on many points respecting the management of her estate, and she began to feel that her return home was providential and had been in a manner pre-ordained.  She learned all that Mrs. Spruce could tell her respecting the famous ’Five Sisters’; how they were the grandest and most venerable trees in all the country round—­and how they stood all together on a grassy eminence about a mile and a half from the Manor house and on the Manor lands just beyond the more low-lying woods that spread between.  Whereupon Maryllia decided that she would take an early ride over her property the next day,—­and gave orders that her favourite mare, ‘Cleopatra,’ ready saddled and bridled, should be brought round to the door at five o’clock the next morning.  This being settled, and Mrs. Spruce having also humbly stated that all the peacock’s feathers she could find had been summarily cast forth from the Manor through the medium of the parcels’ post, Maryllia bade her a kindly good-night.

“To-morrow,” she said, “we will go all over the house together, and you will explain everything to me.  But the first thing to be done is to save those old trees.”

“Well, no one wouldn’t ’ave saved ’em if so be as you ’adn’t come ’ome, Miss,” declared Mrs. Spruce.  “For Mr. Leach he be a man of his word, and as obs’nate as they makes ’em, which the Lord Almighty knows men is all made as obs’nate as pigs—­and he’s been master over the place like—­”

“More’s the pity!” said Maryllia; “But he is master here no longer, Spruce; I am now both mistress and master.  Remember that, please!”

Mrs. Spruce curtseyed dutifully and withdrew.  The close cross-examination she had undergone respecting Leach had convinced her of two things,—­firstly, that her new mistress, though such a childlike-looking creature, was no fool,—­and secondly, that though she was perfectly gentle, kind, and even affectionate in her manner, she evidently had a will of her own, which it seemed likely she would enforce, if necessary, with considerable vigour and imperativeness.  And so the worthy old housekeeper decided that on the whole it would be well to be careful—­to mind one’s P’s and Q’s as it were,—­to pause before rushing pell-mell into a flood of unpremeditated speech, and to pay the strictest possible attention to her regular duties.