Maggie had been four days at her aunt Moss¹’s giving the early June sunshine quite a new brightness in the care-dimmed eyes of that affectionate woman, and making an epoch² for her cousins great and small, who were learning her words and actions by heart, as if she had been a transient avatar of perfect wisdom and beauty.

She was standing³ on the causeway with her aunt and a group of cousins feeding the chickens, at that quiet moment in the life of the farmyards before the afternoon milking-time. The great buildings round the hollow yard were as dreary⁴ and tumbledown as ever, but over the old garden-wall the straggling rose-bushes were beginning to toss their summer weight, and the gray wood and old bricks of the house, on its higher level, had a look of sleepy age in the broad afternoon sunlight, that suited the quiescent⁵ time. Maggie, with her bonnet⁶ over her arm, was smiling down at the hatch of small fluffy⁷ chickens, when her aunt exclaimed —

“Goodness me! who is that gentleman coming in at the gate?”

It was a gentleman on a tall bay horse; and the flanks and neck of the horse were streaked⁸ black with fast riding. Maggie felt a beating at head and heart, horrible as the sudden leaping to life of a savage⁹ enemy who had feigned¹⁰ death.

“Who is it, my dear?” said Mrs. Moss, seeing in Maggie’s face the evidence that she knew.

“It is Mr. Stephen Guest,” said Maggie, rather faintly. “My cousin Lucy’s — a gentleman who is very intimate at my cousin’s.”

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