grew old, and the children grew up, and, one by one, grew out of the old home, for all its additions. Then the father and mother died; and one of the daughters, already a middle-aged woman, came to live at the farm with her husband. But she had no children, and did not use half the house. A room more conveniently close to the modern kitchen was made into her sitting-room, and the old kitchen, at the other end of the house, was shut up. It was as if Life had now quite done with it.
The farm, high as it stands, and bare to the air and light—for the sea stretches wide below it upon three sides, and from it you can see the sun rise out of the water of a morning, and all but sink in it at night—dwells yet in a kind of retirement of its own. There is no made road leading to it, for one thing—only a rough track across the tussock and nodding blue-bells of the cliff; and the configuration of the slope on which it stands, swelling suddenly out into a crest of grey rock on the inland side, hides it from the coach-road, and has really the effect, in fact, as well as in appearance, of separating it from the rest of the settlement. The itinerant drapers and clockmenders, the book-agents and tea-travellers, even the old Syrian pedlar, with his trays of glittering gewgaws, were all apt to leave it unvisited on their rounds. Neighbours found it more natural to invite and welcome Mrs. Callender to their own homes than to set out towards hers, there upon the road to nowhere.
It was with the more surprise, therefore, that Mrs. Callender, one wet June morning, found herself confronted on her doorstep, among the winter violets, by a stranger, a lady; come, of all extra-
