TO THE BITTER END

CHAPTER I.

DOWN IN A FLOWERY VALE.'

AN old-fashioned garden deep in the heart of rural Kent; a garden such as no modern gardener would approve, but sweet scented and beauteous withal, and very dear to its possessor, who is far away across the barren sea, trying to mend his fortunes in Australian gold-fields, and who looks back with many a secret sigh to that one green valley in England which he calls home. It has been his home forty years, and the home of his race for centuries. past. Very hard would it be to part with the old place now; and yet Richard Redmayne has had to look that bitter possibility steadily in the face.

There are no trim flower-beds, circular and dia

VOL. I.

B

mond-shaped; no marvels of ribbon bordering, no masses of uniform colour, no curious specimens of the pickling-cabbage tribe, or varieties of the endive family; but two long wide borders filled with a medley of old-fashioned flowers, a great wealth of roses, a broad expanse of grass, with trees here and there; ancient apple and pear trees, a couple of walnuts, a Spanish chestnut-low and wide-spreading, making a tent of shade-and one great gloomy cedar. The garden is shut in from the outer world, from the quiet country-road which skirts it, by high red-brick walls lined with fruit trees, and crowned with dragon's-mouth and stone-crop; walls which are in themselves a study for the pencil of a preRaphaelite. And beyond the garden-parted from it only by a sweetbrier hedge-there is a wide Kentish orchard, where the deep soft grass is flecked with the tremulous shadows of waving leaves-the sweetest resting-place-a very haven of peace on sultry summer afternoons. And at the end of the orchard there is a pond, where a brood of ducks plash in and out among the water-lilies; and on the other side of the pond the pastures and corn-fields of Brierwood Farm.

Garden and orchard, homestead and farmyard,

belong to Richard Redmayne, who has been bitten with the gold-hunting mania, and is away in Australia, trying to retrieve fortunes that have suffered severely of late years by a succession of unlucky accidents, bad harvests, disastrous speculations in live stock, cattle disease, potato blight,-all the shocks to which agricultural flesh is heir.

He leaves his younger brother behind him—an easy-going, rather weak-minded man, who has never done much for himself in life, but has been for the most part a hanger-on and dependent upon the master of Brierwood-and his brother's wife, by no means easy-going or weak-minded, but a trifle shrewish and sharp-spoken, yet not a bad kind of person at heart. These two, James Redmayne and his wife Hannah, are left in charge of the farm.

And of something infinitely more precious than Brierwood Farm. Dear as every acre of the old home is to the heart of the wanderer, he leaves. behind him something ten thousand times dearerhis daughter Grace, an only child, a tall, slim, auburn-haired girl of nineteen.

She was by no means a striking beauty, this farmer's daughter, who had been educated beyond her station, the little world of Kingsbury in general,

and Mrs. James Redmayne in particular, protested. She was not a woman to take mankind by storm under any circumstances, but fair and lovable notwithstanding; a figure very pleasant to watch flitting about house or garden, tall and slender like the lilies in the long borders, and with a flower-like grace that made her seem akin to them—a sweet, fair young face, framed in reddish-brown hair, with touches of red gold here and there among the waving tresses; a face whose chiefest charm was its complexion, a milk-white skin, with only the faintest blush-rose bloom to warm it into life.

Grace Redmayne had been over-educated — so said Mrs. James, who would have liked to see her niece a proficient in the dairy, and great in the management of poultry. In sober truth, the girl's life was somewhat useless, and Mrs. James had common sense on her side. About the real business of the farm Grace knew nothing. She loved the old home fondly, delighted in wandering among the flowers, and idling away long mornings in the orchard; loved all the live creatures around her, from old Molly the dairymaid, whom she had known from her earliest childhood, to the yellow ducklings hatched yesterday; and there an end.' She had