Page:The Fate of Fenella (1892).djvu/122

 old, the Lady Francis who had flirted, and laughed, and danced; who had shocked her acquaintances, and terrified her best friends, by her mad and foolish frolics—who would have recognized Lady Francis Onslow in the sad-eyed "Mrs. Orme," in her dark and Quakerlike simplicity of dress, who stood mournfully alone upon the steamer, and looked her last upon her native shores.

It is a week later. A little furnished house, standing in a garden that runs down to the edge of the cliff, about a mile out of St. Peter's Port, has been taken by a quiet but very lovely little lady, who apparently is a widow, and who has given her name to the house agent as "Mrs. Orme."

She has engaged a couple of maids, and filled her tiny house with the flowers for which Guernsey is famous, and that are so cheap that not to have flowers in every corner is not to have the very breath of life. The window of her little sitting room looks over the blue sea that is bluer than any other sea in English waters. Out there is the low land of Herm, and all the little rocky islands glittering and shining like jewels set in the blue, and far away the long straight line of Sark, with her steep cliffs and jagged rocks filling in the picture on the horizon; while, in the foreground, there are countless little sails of snowy whiteness that move to and fro upon the crisp