and dells as yet remain to make the charm and glamour of rural England.  Primroses peeped out in smiling clusters from every mossy nook, and the pale purple of a myriad violets spread a wave of soft colour among the last year’s fallen leaves, which had served good purpose in keeping the tender buds warm till Spring should lift them from their earth-cradles into full-grown blossom.  Maryllia’s bright eyes, glancing here and there, saw and noted a thousand beauties at every turn,—­the chains of social convention and ordinance had fallen from her soul, and a joyous pulse of freedom quickened her blood and sent it dancing through her veins in currents of new exhilaration and vitality.  With her multi-millionaire aunt, she had lived a life of artificial constraint, against which, despite its worldly brilliancy, her inmost and best instincts had always more or less rebelled;—­now,—­finding herself alone, as it were, with Mother Nature, she sprang like a child to that great maternal bosom, and nestled there with a sense of glad refreshment and peace.

“What dear wildflowers!” she murmured now, as restraining Cleopatra’s coquettish gambols, she rode more slowly along, and spied the bluebells standing up among tangles of green, making exquisite contrast with the golden glow of aconites and the fragile white of wood-anemones,—­“They are ever so much prettier than the hot-house things one gets any day in Paris and London!  Big forced roses,—­great lolling, sickly-scented lilies, and orchids—­oh dear! how tired I am of orchids!  Every evening a bouquet of orchids for five weeks—­Sundays not excepted,—­shall I ever forget the detestable ’rare specimens’!”

A little frown puckered her brow, and for a moment the lines of her pretty mouth drooped and pouted with a quaintly petulant expression, like that of a child going to cry.

“It was complete persecution!” she went on, crooning her complaints to herself and patting Cleopatra’s arched neck by way of accompaniment to her thoughts—­“Absolute dodging and spying round corners after the style of a police detective.  I just hate a lover who makes his love, if it is love, into a kind of whip to flog your poor soul with!  Roxmouth here, Roxmouth there, Roxmouth everywhere!- -he was just like the water in the Ancient Mariner ’and not a drop to drink.’  At the play, at the Opera, in the picture-galleries, at the races, at the flower-shows, at all the ‘crushes’ and big functions,—­in London, in Paris, in New York, in St. Petersburg, in Vienna,—­always ’ce cher Roxmouth’—­as Aunt Emily said;—­money no consideration, distance no object,—­always ‘ce cher Roxmouth,’ stiff as a poker, clean as fresh paint, and apparently as virtuous as an old maid,—­with all his aristocratic family looming behind him, and a long ancestry of ghosts in the shadow of time, extending away back to some Saxon ‘nobles,’ who no doubt were coarse barbarians that ate more raw meat than was good for them, and had to be carried