The biggest young man caught up a little one under his arm, and plunged amid the boughs; another little one lingered behind for a few moments to look shyly at Christopher, with an oblique manner of hiding her mouth against her shoulder and her eyes behind her pinafore.  Then she vanished, the boy and the second young man followed, and Ethelberta and Christopher stood within the wood-bound circle alone.

‘I hope I have caused no inconvenience by interrupting the proceedings,’ said Christopher softly; ‘but I so very much wished to see you!’

‘Did you, indeed—­really wish to see me?’ she said gladly.  ’Never mind inconvenience then; it is a word which seems shallow in meaning under the circumstances.  I surely must say that a visit is to my advantage, must I not?  I am not as I was, you see, and may receive as advantages what I used to consider as troubles.’

‘Has your life really changed so much?’

’It has changed.  But what I first meant was that an interesting visitor at a wrong time is better than a stupid one at a right time.’

’I had been behind the trees for some minutes, looking at you, and thinking of you; but what you were doing rather interrupted my first meditation.  I had thought of a meeting in which we should continue our intercourse at the point at which it was broken off years ago, as if the omitted part had not existed at all; but something, I cannot tell what, has upset all that feeling, and—­’

‘I can soon tell you the meaning of my extraordinary performance,’ Ethelberta broke in quickly, and with a little trepidation.  ’My mother-in-law, Lady Petherwin, is dead; and she has left me nothing but her house and furniture in London—­more than I deserve, but less than she had distinctly led me to expect; and so I am somewhat in a corner.’

‘It is always so.’

’Not always, I think.  But this is how it happened.  Lady Petherwin was very capricious; when she was not foolishly kind she was unjustly harsh.  A great many are like it, never thinking what a good thing it would be, instead of going on tacking from side to side between favour and cruelty, to keep to a mean line of common justice.  And so we quarrelled, and she, being absolute mistress of all her wealth, destroyed her will that was in my favour, and made another, leaving me nothing but the fag-end of the lease of the town-house and the furniture in it.  Then, when we were abroad, she turned to me again, forgave everything, and, becoming ill afterwards, wrote a letter to the brother, to whom she had left the bulk of her property, stating that I was to have twenty-thousand of the one-hundred-thousand pounds she had bequeathed to him—­as in the original will—­doing this by letter in case anything should happen to her before a new will could be considered, drawn, and signed, and trusting to his honour quite that he would obey her expressed wish should she die abroad.  Well, she did die, in the full persuasion