She had left her bed early, full of brisk plans which concerned the greater comfort of her father’s life and were also to reach as far as her cousin’s tower. But even as she fastened the crisp ’kerchief round a throat that shamed the cambric with its living white, she had been handed a note from Master Rickart himself.
This was pencilled on a slip of paper, one half of which had obviously been devoted to some fugitive calculations, and which ran therefore in a curious strain:
My Dear Girl,—Do not Ash: salts (50) : (20.1722...)
attempt I beg of you, to disturb traces of sulphur but not
me this morning. I shall be gaugeable Calcium as before in
engaged on important work re- the ratio 7.171 5.32
quiring the undivided attention 7027.001
which solitude alone can secure. Mem. try in Val. foetida.
Ellinor read and was dashed, read again and laughed aloud.—Gracious powers what a pair of eccentrics had her relatives grown into!
But she was in high spirits, and hope rose in her heart. She was free from her chains; she was back from her exile, home in England, home in the dearest spot of that dear island! Her first outlook upon the world had been into the closes of the Garden of Herbs; and it had been to her as if the familiar face of a friend had looked back at her unchanged, yet full of promise. The beauty of the freshly-washed woods (still in their autumn coats of many colours: from russet to lemon-yellow, from the vermilion of the turning ash-leaf to the grey-white of the fir needle), she drew it all into her long-starved soul, even as she breathed in the wild purity of the air.