A bundle of purple tares lay ready in a corner for Mary to feed her favourites; and for the next ten minutes or so she was happily employed going from stall to stall, and gratifying that inordinate appetite for green meat which seems natural to all horses.
Not a groom or stable-boy appeared while she was in the stable; and she was just going away, when her attention was caught by a flood of sunshine streaming into an old disused harness-room at the end of the stable--a room with one small window facing the Fell.
Whence could that glow of western light come?
Assuredly not from the low-latticed window which faced eastward, and was generally obscured by a screen of cobwebs.

The room was only used as a storehouse for lumber, and it was nobody's business to clean the window.
Mary looked in, curious to solve the riddle.

A door which she had often noticed, but never seen opened, now stood wide open, and the old quadrangular garden, which was James Steadman's particular care, smiled at her in the golden evening light.

Seen thus, this little old Dutch garden seemed to Mary the prettiest thing she had ever looked upon.
There were beds of tulips and hyacinths, ranunculus, narcissus, tuberose, making a blaze of colour against the old box borders, a foot high.

The crumbling old brick walls of the outbuildings, and that dungeon-like wall which formed the back of the new house, were clothed with clematis and wistaria, woodbine and magnolia.