"No, I am the only visitor."
"Do they live all alone?" Isabella Vernon's voice was rather unsteady, and her eyes were still searching the girl's face.
"They have a little son," Philippa replied, "but he is not well just now. They are anxious about him."
"I am sorry," said the other simply. "We used to have very happy times in the old days when--your aunt stayed with Lady Louisa--and her brother too sometimes."
"He was my father. Did you know him?"
"Oh yes, I knew him quite well."
"He died some years ago."
"Ah! I had not heard. He and I were very good friends when we were young. But I don't suppose he remembered me."
"I do not think I ever heard him speak of you."
"No, very likely not. But I have a good memory, especially for my friends. One loses sight of people very easily, far too easily; and then it is difficult to find them again when one returns to England after a long absence. You have been a good deal abroad too, I expect."
"Yes, I have lived almost entirely abroad. So much so, in fact, that I am disgracefully ignorant about my native land. I hardly know it at all. I was so interested as I travelled down here, to see how utterly different it was to anything I had ever seen."
"I think that is the most interesting part of travelling," answered Isabella Vernon, smiling "The aspect of the different countries, I mean. Not the people, but the very earth itself. You cross a frontier and at once all seems changed. There may be hills and trees and water just as there have been before, but they have not in the least the same appearance. Of course there are some tiresome folks who are always seeing likenesses; they will tell you glibly that Canada reminds them of Cumberland, or South Africa of the Sahara, but that is merely because they are blind. Having eyes they see not the subtle characteristics of every land and miss its individuality. I have journeyed all round the globe, and now, as I sit by my own fireside and think of what I have seen, it is always some particular point about the look of a country that comes first into my mind. The peculiar ochre tint of the bare stretches of Northern China; the outlines of the hills in Japan--so irregular and yet so sharp, as though they had been cut out with a sharp pair of scissors in a shaky hand. The towering masses of the Rockies, where the strata runs all sideways, as if a slice of the very crust of the universe had been tilted up on edge by some gigantic upheaval.