“Hang the ghost!” said he; but then he came from the eastern counties, and had no reverence for the old family “fetch.”  “Hang the ghost! why shouldn’t that shadow have been the brown pony?  Ain’t he out at grass, and didn’t I find the garden-door ajar this morning?  He came in, I’ll be bound.”  Then the gardener shouldered his spade, and finding a number of footmarks all over the place, specially about the bed of lilies, and certainly not those of a pony, he carefully obliterated them, and held his peace.  Shaking his head when alone, and muttering, “They’re a queer lot, these Melcombes—­who’d have expected this now!  If the dead ones don’t walk, the live ones do.  Restless, that’s what it is.  Restless, too much to eat.  I should say, and too little to do.  When the missis comes we shall have more sensible doings, and I wish the missis had never left us, that I do.”

Mrs. Peter Melcombe, thus welcomed back again in the gardener’s mind, was then driving up to the door of Melcombe House, and Valentine was stepping out to receive her.

It was natural that she should feel agitated, and Valentine accosted her so seriously as to increase her emotion.  She had been able to recover her usually equable spirits after the loss of her child, it was only on particular occasions that she now gave way to tears.  She was by no means of their number who love to make a parade of grief; on the contrary, emotion was painful to her, and she thankfully avoided it when she could.

She retired with Laura, and after a reasonable time recovered herself, taking care to go at once into the room where her darling had slept, and where he had played, that she might not again be overcome.

“I have dreaded this inexpressibly,” she said, sobbing, to Laura, who was following her with real sympathy.

“Valentine was very odd,” answered Laura; “you would, I am sure, have got over your return quite calmly, if he had been less solemn.  Surely, Amelia dear, he is altered.”

“He was oppressed, no doubt, at sight of me; he felt for me.”

Laura said no more, but several times during that first day she made wondering observations.  She looked in vain for the light-hearted companionable young fellow with whom she had become intimate in cousinly fashion, and whom she had fully hoped to consult about a certain affair of her own.  She saw an air of oppressive bitterness and absence of mind that discouraged her greatly.  “There is no mistaking his expression of countenance,” she thought; “he must have been disappointed in love.”

“Laura,” exclaimed Mrs. Melcombe, when the two ladies, having left the dining-room, were alone together in the old grandmother’s favourite parlour, now used as a drawing-room—­“Laura, what can this mean?  Is he dyspeptic?  Is he hypochondriacal?  I declare, if Mr. Craik had not been invited to meet us, I hardly see how we could have got through the dinner:  he is very odd.”