"If I'd like!" cried the girl. "Oh, Aunt West! it's just what I was wishing for. I shall be so happy!"
"Yes; you shall go, dear, and stay all day, if you like. I'll put you up a nice cold lunch in a little basket, and I'll hire the lodge-keeper's boy to show you the way. I'll give him a shilling to go, and he will stay all day to keep you from getting frightened."
"I shall not be frightened," said Leonora, radiant.
"I don't know; it's still and lonesome-like there, and the bats and screech-owls might startle you. And there's an old dismantled chapel, too—"
"Oh, how lovely! I shall sketch that, too!" Leonora exclaimed, clapping her bands like a gleeful child.
"And a little old grave-yard," pursued Mrs. West. "Some of the old Lancasters are buried there. You might be afraid of their ghosts."
"I am not afraid of the Lancasters, dead or living," the girl answered, saucily, her spirits rising at the prospect before her.
She set forth happily under the convoy of little Johnnie Dale, the lodge-keeper's lad, a loquacious urchin who plied her with small-talk while he walked by her side with the lunch-basket Mrs. West had prepared with as dainty care as if for Lady Lancaster herself.
She did not check the boy's happy volubility, although she did not heed it very much, either, as they hurried through the grand old park, where the brown-eyed deer browsed on the velvety green grass, and the great oak-trees cast shadows, perhaps a century old, across their path.
When they had shut the park gates behind them, and struck into the green country lanes, bordered with honeysuckle and lilac, Leonora drew breath with a sigh of delight.