her head like those of a Greek goddess. Her hair was darker and more abundant, and her eyes retained all their old charm, with some rarer and nobler addition.

To be sure, she had not the perfect regularity of feature that distinguished some of her associates, that exact beauty which Titian’s Venus possesses, and which makes 186 no man’s heart beat a throb the faster. Her face had rather the mobile irregularity of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, the charming face that men love passionately, the face that men can die for.

186

At the close of the third year she refused all invitations for the summer holidays, and went back to Seat-Ambar. There had not been much communication between Will and herself. He was occupied with his land and his sheep, his wife and his two babies. People then took each other’s affection as a matter of course, without the daily assurance of it. About twice a year Will had sent her a few strong words of love, and a bare description of any change about the home, or else Alice had covered a sheet with pretty nothings, written in the small, pointed, flowing characters then fashionable.

But the love of Aspatria for her home depended on no such trivial, accidental tokens. It was in her blood; her personality was knotted to Seat-Ambar by centuries of inherited affection; she could test 187 it by the fact that it would have killed her to see it pass into a stranger’s hands. When once she had turned her face northward, it seemed impossible to travel quickly enough. Hundreds of miles away she felt the cool wind blowing through the garden, and the scent of the damask rose was on it. She heard the gurgling of the becks and the wayside streams, and the whistling of the boys in the barn, and the tinkling of the sheep-bells on the highest fells. The raspberries were ripe in their sunny corner; she tasted them afar off. 188 The dark oak rooms, their perfume of ancient things, their air of homelike comfort,—it was all so vivid, so present to her memory, that her heart beat and thrilled, as the breast of a nursing mother thrills and beats for her longing babe.

187

188

She had told no one she was coming; for, the determination made, she knew that she would reach home before the Dalton postman got the letter to Seat-Ambar. The gig she had hired she left at the lower garden gate; and then she walked quickly through the rose-alley up to the front door. It stood open, and she heard a baby crying. How strange the wailing notes 

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