"Poor old man!" said Ellinor. "I wish we could do something to comfort him. I feel as if everybody must be happy here. It is such a charming, exhilarating place. Dear me, how windy it is! The path is all strewn with the white petals of the cherry blossom."
"They have degenerated into wild cherry trees," said Sybil. "Long ago papa says these must have been good fruit trees of many kinds, and this is a great cherry country, you know."
The wind dropped that afternoon, but only temporarily. It rose again so much during the night that by the next morning the grounds looked, to use little Annis's expression, "quite untidy".
"And down in the village, or just beyond it," said Mark, who had been for an early stroll, "at one place it really looks as if it had been snowing. The road skirts that old farmhouse; you know it, father? I forget the name—there's a grand cherry orchard there."
"'Mayling Farm,' you must mean," said Mr. Raynald. "Farmer Giles's. Oh, by the way, that reminds me, Sybil," but a glance round the table made him stop short. They were at breakfast. He scarcely felt inclined to relate the tragic story before the younger children, "they might look frightened or run away if they came across the poor fellow," he reflected. "I will tell Sybil about it afterwards."
Easter holidays were not yet over, though the governess had returned, so regular routine was set aside, and the whole of the young party, Ellinor included, spent that morning in a scramble among the hills.
The children seemed untirable, and set off again somewhere or other in the afternoon. Sybil was busy with her mother, writing letters and orders to be despatched to London, so that towards four o'clock or so, when Miss March, having finished her own correspondence, entered the drawing-room, she found it deserted.
Sybil had promised to practise some duets with her, and while waiting on the chance of her coming, Ellinor seated herself at the piano and began to play—nothing very important—just snatches of old airs which she wove into a kind of half-dreamy harmony, one melting into another as they occurred to her.
All at once a shadow fell on the keys, and then she remembered having heard the door softly open a moment or two before—so softly, that she had not looked round, imagining it to be the wind, which, though fallen now, still lingered about.
Now her ideas took another shape.