HARRY JOSCELYN.
——
VOL. III.

HARRY JOSCELYN.

BY
MRS. OLIPHANT
AUTHOR OF
“The Chronicles of Carlingford,”
&c., &c.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. III.
LONDON:
HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS,
13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.
1881.
All rights reserved.

HARRY JOSCELYN.

CHAPTER I.
AFTER TEN YEARS.

TEN years is a large slice out of a life; but it slips by, not leaving much trace in a rural country where everything goes quietly, and where Christmas follows after Christmas with scarcely any sign by which one can be identified from another on looking back. We will not say that nothing had happened in the White House to mark the ten years from the time when young Harry Joscelyn disappeared from the Fell country, and it became evident that no one there was likely to hear anything of him more. Various things had happened: one, for instance, was that Joan had married Philip Selby, and was now the mistress of Heatonshaw, and could not easily remember, so strange is the effect of such a change, how she had contented herself in her previous life, or what had been the habits and customs of Joan Joscelyn. More had happened to her in this than in any other ten years of her life; but yet they had glided over very calmly, day following day with such a gentle monotony that it was hard for her to decide how many of them there were, or which was which. She had no child to measure the years by, which was a misfortune, but one which she bore with submission: reflecting to herself that if children are a comfort they are often also a great handful, and that when they are troublesome there is nothing else so troublesome in all the world. Philip Selby himself was less philosophical, and would have ventured gladly upon the risk for the sake of the blessing; but it was not so to be. And thus they had little evidence before them of how the years stole away. But all that he had augured, and Joan had agreed to, about the house, had come true. There were the best of beasts in the byres, and heavy crops on the arable land, and a phaeton in the coach-house, and horses in the stables such as no man needed to be ashamed of. And with all this, there was a very comfortable couple inside. Joan, on her marriage, had been half ashamed of the fine room, which was called—not according to her old-fashioned formula, the parlour, but—the drawing-room, to which her husband had brought her home, and which had been furnished by one of the best shops in Carlisle, with furniture such as was approved by the taste of the time. There was a white paper on the walls, and a great deal of gilding, and sofas and tables with legs that were crooked and curly. But by the end of ten years much that was somewhat showy once had toned down. The furniture had got more shapely and a little human; the place had worn into the fashion of the people that inhabited it. In summer it was a perfect bower of lilies and roses, the great white shafts of the one rising above the broad branches, heavy with flowers, of the other (for in those days there were no standards), and the whole air sweet with the mingled perfume. Liddy Joscelyn, Mrs. Selby’s little sister, thought there was no flower-garden in the world like it; but then she had not been away from home since she was twelve, and had not seen much, and there was nothing like it about the White House.

That, place, too, had changed in these years. Ralph Joscelyn was the one upon whom the change had told most. It was not that he was much altered in personal appearance, nor yet that he had entirely mended and corrected his ways. Perhaps indeed the alteration visible in him was more due to the fact that there was nobody about the place who crossed him, no one who opposed any strenuous opposition to his will, or dissented from his opinions, than any real alteration. But it was a quieter life which the homestead led, subject to much fewer storms than of old; and Mrs. Joscelyn lived a far less anxious life. The loss of her youngest boy so long ago—though it might not be really the loss of him, since who could tell what day he might re-appear again?—was not a thing, as everyone said, that she could be expected to get over. But the ten years had calmed her, and, what was more, Liddy had calmed her. Lydia had been sent for to her school when her mother was in the depths of this trouble, and she had never been suffered to go back again, her presence being the only consolation which the gentle and unhappy woman was the better for. And after ten years of Liddy’s constant company, Mrs. Joscelyn was a very different woman. Joan, who had been so sympathetic with her mother through that last family trouble, without understanding her in the others, understood still less the effect produced by her little sister, who smoothed down everything without any apparent trouble, more by understanding it, so far as appeared, than from anything she did. When Joan’s reign terminated, Lydia became the dominant spirit in the house. She was so at fourteen; how much more at twenty! It was not a good thing for the butter and the cheese. The dairy produce of the White House fell off wonderfully. It was no longer half the quantity, and still less was it equal in quality, to the butter of Joan’s time. Old Simon never ceased shaking his head over it till his dying day, and went out of human consciousness moaning to himself that “A’ things was altered, and no t’ half o’ t’ money coming in.” It was he that had always been the salesman, and he felt it deeply. For half of the time or so Joan had done her utmost, driving over in the morning and spending hours endeavouring to indoctrinate her sister with the mysteries of that art; but Liddy only laughed, and kept her pretty white hands by her side, and declared herself incapable. “I don’t know what to do with these things,” she would say, gazing at the bowls of milk, without the least sense of shame, with even a smile on her face; and to Joan’s consternation her father, coming in when this was said, and himself standing in the doorway, swaying his big figure to and fro, said, “Let her alone, let her alone, Joan. You did it, but she is another kind from you.”

“That she is,” said Joan. “She’s not the profitable kind either, if she let’s the dairy take care of itself.”

But to this Joscelyn paid no attention; and Mrs. Selby was led to her chaise stupefied, not knowing whether she was asleep or awake, so bewildered was she. The dairy went off, it was no longer celebrated as of yore. The cows decreased in number, for what was the use of keeping them when they brought in so little profit? And by degrees the house changed altogether. Lydia, slim and straight, with her white hands, and feet that scarcely sounded upon the old passage, gradually modified everything. When she was seen in a new riding-habit, and a hat with a feather, going out to ride with her father, the old servants could scarcely contain themselves; and the timid mother, coming out to see her, smoothed the horse’s sleek coat with a frightened hand, and did not know how to look at the girl, or her father, who was as proud of Lydia as Mrs. Joscelyn herself could be.

And then the old piano, which nobody had touched for years—for Joan, who had ended her education at fifteen, had never learned any more music than was contained in a first book of exercises—was sent off to an attic, and a new piano was bought for Lydia. Where it came from no one could quite understand, for it was impossible to believe that Joscelyn had drawn his purse-strings to such an extent; but all the same it arrived, and Lydia, sometimes going into Wyburgh, sometimes having her professor out to the White House, had lessons, and practised diligently, and by-and-bye became in her way a musician, astonishing all the neighbourhood with her powers. A young lady who rode about the country on a handsome horse, and who played the piano, was something altogether new in the place. She might have been much more profoundly instructed without producing half so great an impression. The house altogether rose in the social scale. People came to call who had never been seen near the White House before; and they found the mistress of the house, who had always been genteel, a gentle woman, ladylike and subdued, and her daughter one of the prettiest girls in the county, with a sort of elegance about her which was the inheritance she had received from her mother, strengthened and consolidated by the superior strength which she got from the other side of the house. When Joscelyn himself appeared, which was rarely, his fine form and strength, and the refinement imparted by a crown of white hair, raised him, too, to a sort of pinnacle. People began to say that they found they had done him injustice, and that after all the present representative of the Joscelyns was not unworthy his race. The process was slow, but it was very complete. When Will and Tom appeared with their wives, it was unaccountable how “put out” and “set down” they felt, as if they were going to their landlord’s, where everything was finer than the surroundings they were accustomed to, and not to their father’s, upon whose shabby furniture Mrs. Will and Mrs. Tom had looked with contempt. Even Joan looked round her with a curiosity which was mingled with grievance, scarcely able to restrain the thought that what was good enough for her, might certainly have been good enough for Liddy. Liddy it was clear did not think so. And how that little thing knew, or where she had got her instinctive acquaintance with polite ways, Mrs. Selby, who was on the whole proud of Liddy, could not tell; but so it was. The house brightened up generally; here a new carpet, and there a new curtain, made a change in its dingy aspect. The old furniture was made the most of, and old china, and all the stores of a long established house brought out to embellish the parlours; the very hall and passages were brushed up, the table, and the service at the table, so improved, that Joan too thought she must be dining with some of the great county people, whom the Joscelyns had always thought themselves equal to, but who had not acknowledged the Joscelyns.

“The thing that surprises me is where she learned it all,” Mrs. Selby said; “a bit of a thing that has seen no more than the rest of us; but she has a deal of you in her, mother, far more than any of the rest.”

“Ah, my dear,” said Mrs. Joscelyn, shaking her head, “I never had the courage to settle things my own way. It was not that I didn’t know: I knew very well how things ought to be done.” This little gentle assertion of her gentility Mrs. Joscelyn felt was her due in the new development of affairs. It was not all the discovery of Liddy. She had known well enough all the time. Circumstances had been too much for her; but the refinements of society were her natural atmosphere. Joan looked at her mother with mingled respect and amusement, proud that she was such a lady, yet feeling the joke of her superiority.

“Yes, mother,” she said, “I mind how you and Phil talked the first time he came to the White House. It was as good as a play to hear you. He never let on it was me he wanted, but to have a talk with you, such a superior woman. I did not understand a word you were saying, and I took pains to let him see that the dairy and the stables were what I was most acquainted with; but that didn’t make any difference, you see.”

“You were never one to make the most of yourself, Joan,” said the mother, mildly. “I always knew there was a great deal more in you than you would ever show,” at which Joan laughed; but she was not displeased. And she was proud of her young sister when Liddy came riding over on the last perfection from her father’s stable, looking like a young princess. She was the nearest thing to a child of her own that Joan was ever likely to have, and she forgave her possession of a great many indulgences which no one had thought of conceding to Joan. When it appeared, however, that Lydia had a groom behind her, Mrs. Selby’s soul was stirred within her.

“Now, Liddy,” she said, “I can stand a deal, but you’ll ruin father if you go on like this. A groom behind you! what will you want next? Father’s just infatuated, that is all I can say.”

“It’s only a livery coat,” said Liddy, “that’s all. It doesn’t cost very much. I’ll pay it off my own allowance, and father will never be the worse——”

Here she was interrupted by a shriek from her elder sister. “Your allowance? What next?” she said. “I never had a penny to myself when I was at home, and hard ado to get a bill paid. If it had not been for the butter money, I should never have had a gown to my back.”

“But that would not do for me,” said Lydia, with a toss of her head; and, indeed, to see her here with her airy figure, and her close-fitting habit, and the beautiful bay arching his fine neck in the background, and to suggest any connection with the butter money was a thing which only an elder sister without sentiment or sense of appropriateness could have done. The Duke’s daughter did not look more unlike any such homely particulars; indeed, the Duke’s daughter was not fit, as Joan said, proudly, to herself, to “hold the candle” to little Liddy Joscelyn.

“I don’t know what’s coming of it,” Mrs. Selby said to her husband; “but, Phil, you and me will stand by that child, and see her out of it—will you, goodman?”

“That I will, my dear,” Philip Selby said; “but Joscelyn has been doing not badly, and I dare say he can afford to let the little one have her fling. He has none to think of now but Liddy—and there’s Uncle Henry’s money.”

This allusion always made Joan ready to cry, though she was not given to tears. “I would rather burn off my fingers than touch Uncle Henry’s money,” she said. “It will never be me that will put my hand to it, and give my consent that yon poor lad is not coming home——”

“We must be reasonable, my dear,” Philip Selby said, mildly, “and the others will not be so patient. There is one thing you shall do if you like, Joan, and that is give your share to Liddy. It would never be any pleasure to you.”

Joan looked at her husband with a startled air. She was more matter of fact than he was, and the idea of giving over actual money to which she had a right, to anyone, was a thing which gave her somewhat of a shock. In their ordinary affairs she had to keep rather a tight hand upon her Phil, who was too easy about his money generally; but this was a complicated case, and puzzled her much.

“Give Liddy my share? You say true it would be little, little pleasure to me; but money is money, and there are some to come after us. It’s fine to be generous, but we must think upon justice. What’s Liddy’s is Liddy’s, and what’s mine is mine.”

It was from no want of kindness that Joan spoke: but she could not help it. It was as natural to close her hand over money, even when she hated it, as it was for others to throw it away.

“You will think better of it,” her husband said.

“Oh! it’s very likely I will think better of it. A woman cannot live with a prodigal like you without getting into ill ways. But I was always brought up to stick to my money; and I’ve you to look after as well. If you had not me to watch over you, you would give away the coat off your back.”

“For all that I’ve always had plenty,” said Selby, “and now more than plenty—with a good wife to take care of it and me.”

“You may say a wife to take care of you,” said Joan, “and how you ever kept a penny in your purse before you got her, is what I cannot tell; though, after all, when a man spends nothing upon himself, it’s easy keeping him going. But I’m one that sticks to my money. Give what you please else, but keep a grip upon your money, that’s always been my way.” Then she added, after a pause: “There will never be any question about that; when he knows it’s all left to him, it stands to reason that he will come back. Joscelyns have more regard to their own interest. They are not easy-going like you.”

“I wish I could think so,” Mr. Selby said.

And so the conversation ended. Uncle Henry had died not very long before, leaving behind him only an old will in which everything was left to Harry. The executors, who were both influential persons in Wyburgh, had advertised for him, or for news of him, but none had come; and the family generally had accepted this as a proof that Harry was dead—the family, all but the mother and Joan, who were both strenuous that nothing should be done, and no division made. Mrs. Joscelyn would have been overruled before now, but Joan was a stronger opponent, and she had the backing of her husband, of whom her brothers stood in a little awe; so that the division and distribution of Uncle Henry’s funds had been postponed. But this delay could not last: the elder brothers, who were men with families and in want of money, were certain to push for a settlement. They had no doubt, and not very much feeling, about the younger one who was lost. It had been entirely his own doing. He was a fool to have gone away like that, and compromised himself, and thrown away all his chances; but whatever happened to him in consequence was his own fault. If he had died, or if he was living in some obscure corner far away, were not they equally innocent? They had tried all they could to find him—the trustees were trying now. Old Pilgrim was advertising far and wide. If Harry were dead, or if he were so far away as to be out of reach of this call, it was not their fault; and they wanted no more than their share—but that share, there was no doubt, would be very convenient. Will’s sons were growing up, and Tom was taking in more land to his farm. To each of these, as to most people, a little money would have been of the greatest use. And it was all very well for Joan to talk who had neither chick nor child, and was in such easy circumstances; it was well for her to talk whose husband supplied her with everything, and who had no need of money; but they were men and knew better. They knew that men are not such fools as to stay away from their home as Harry had done. Nobody did such a thing, especially when advertisements were in the papers about them, and “something to their advantage” promised.

“Something to your advantage means money,” said Will. “’Twouldn’t be long I’d skulk away at the end of the world if you were to give me the chance.”

“He’s never skulking away at the end of the world,” said Tom. “If he went off at all, he went to California or thereabouts; and he’d have come home at the first scent of money. Bless you, we know our own breed;” and in this the other brother concurred. But the trustees held fast. They would not consent to any distribution of the money till Harry, if Harry still existed, had every chance of hearing of it. Privately Mr. Pilgrim had no objection to advance to Tom the money he wanted for that addition to his farm. There was solid security, and a feasible reason for borrowing. “There’s but too much reason to think that your poor brother will never turn up again,” the executor allowed; “but we must not go too fast.” Alas! such is the weakness of human nature that the other Joscelyns ere long were not sure that they wished their poor brother to turn up again. The money would be so convenient! When is there a time that money is not convenient? And it could do him no good, poor fellow, if he was in his grave—which at the same time would be his own fault.

Very different, however, from the conclusions of Will and Joan were those which were held at the White House on this subject. Mrs. Joscelyn had never consented to that view. “He may have been led away,” she said; “but do you think my boy would die and me not know? Oh, Liddy, my darling, many a time when you see me in low spirits, and ask me why, and I say it’s nothing, that is what it is. It is borne in upon me that something is the matter with one of the boys. I’ve different feelings for each of them. People may laugh that don’t understand, but you’ll not laugh, my Liddy dear. I never said it to one of the others, but I may say it to you. If it’s Ben, or if it’s Huntley, I have a kind of a feeling—and as sure as letters come it’s found to be true. There is always a something. Now it stands to reason that Harry should be the same, but as he never writes we never can tell. Sometimes I’ve been quite light-hearted for nothing at all, and I’ve said to myself, ‘That’s Harry: something good’s happening to him.’ Do you think it is natural that if he had died—oh, the Lord preserve him!—his mother would not know?”

“It would not be natural at all,” said Lydia, confidently; “he would come and stand by your bedside; I don’t feel the least doubt of that. But there is one thing I should like, mamma; I should like to go abroad. I feel sure that I should find him. I think that I should find him somewhere not very far away—or else in America: I have quite made up my mind to that.”

“You would scarcely know your brother if you saw him,” said Mrs. Joscelyn, shaking her head; “You were so little, my pet; and poor Harry must be changed in ten years.”

“Oh, I should know him,” cried Lydia. She held her pretty head high. She was very sure of most things. “After you are grown up you don’t change so much. He might not know me, but I should know him wherever I saw him. Ah, how delightful it would be to bring him back to you!” said Lydia, throwing her arms round her mother. The words and the arms were alike sweet. Nobody had given Mrs. Joscelyn this food for her heart in the old days.

“My darling!” she said; “but I see no chance for you to go abroad, far less—far less——”

“There is no telling what may happen,” said Liddy, “everybody, you know, goes abroad now.”

But Mrs. Joscelyn shook her head. She saw the practical difficulties here.

CHAPTER II.
A NEW COUSIN.

LYDIA had indeed as little prospect of going abroad as any girl could have. Her own kindred dreamt of no such indulgences, and she had no friends likely to suggest them. In these days people stayed still where their home was, and did not think of the continued changes and absences which make up our modern life—though the spirit of travel was beginning to be in the air, and younger spirits, even in the Fell-country, began to form dreams on the subject. Perhaps there never was a time when the idea of travelling was not attractive to the young, and when Italy was not a name to conjure withal. Lydia Joscelyn had read everything that fell into her hands all her life, even the Book of Beauty, which her brother-in-law, Philip Selby, presented to her with an inscription on the flyleaf, at Christmas. Half the stories, and half, almost all, the poetry there, bore reference to “the sunny South.” She was resolute to go “abroad” some time or other; to live among the dark-eyed Antonios and lovely Rosalbas of romance. And there, she had made up her mind, she would find Harry, and bring him back to her mother. It was her dream. Whenever she had nothing else to do she thought of it, and represented to herself how she should find him, how he would try to conceal himself from her, and by what wonderful ruses and clever expedients she would discover his secret and prove him to be her brother. It is not to be supposed that there did not mingle in Lydia’s dreams, visions of some other figure still more attractive than that of her brother, who having been five-and-twenty when he disappeared, ten years ago, was according to her calculation “quite old” by this time. It is not quite certain that she did not expect him to be grey-haired, and a little decrepit; but there would be some friend, some protector, some handsome young count, or even prince, who would have afforded the stranger hospitality, and in whom Liddy felt the possible hero of her life to be embodied. He was quite vague, except a pair of beautiful eyes; there was nothing at all about him else that she was certain of; but those eyes looked out of the mists upon her, with every kind of tender and delightful look. He would help her, could any one doubt, to bring Harry home? and afterwards—perhaps—would ask for his reward. Such was the natural sequence of events. To do Lydia justice, however, this visionary prince was a secondary personage, only indulged in as a dream by way of recreation, after she had, in her thoughts, tracked Harry down, and got him at her mercy.

She had not much society or recreation at the White House. There were times, indeed, when, if it had been possible for a girl to have done so, Lydia would have had no objection to try, as Harry had done, what the society of the “Red Lion” could do for her; but to do her justice one trial would have been enough. She did what was quite as good, and more innocent; she ran off sometimes into the kitchen of the White House, and talked with the servants, and heard a hundred stories both of the past and present, and learned the countryside, so that she knew who everybody was, and their mothers, and their wives, and all that had happened to them. It was there, rather than from her mother and her sister, that she heard about Harry. The old cook remembered everything about him, from the time when he had cut his teeth. She had a recollection of that night when he had gone away, and still excused herself for not having gone to the rescue. “T’ master was all about t’ house, travelling up and down in his stocking-feet—was it my part to oop and open the door?” Thus her apologies accused her according to the proverb. The other women were younger, but they too had something to tell. And then Liddy would go back to the quietude of the parlour, where her mother was sitting in the same attitude, reading the same book. The parlour looked cheerful enough, but there was never any change in it, not half so much as in the kitchen, where some one was always moving about, and there was a perpetual flow of talk. Liddy never spent an evening away from home, except two or three times a year to her sister’s, when there was “a party” prepared weeks in advance, and talked of for months after; or at Dr. Selby’s in the village, where now and then there were entertainments of a homelier kind.

Young Selby, who had been Harry’s friend and a frequenter of the “Red Lion,” though he had not yet sown all his wild oats, was a person of some importance in the village society. He was his father’s assistant, and although it was said that he was far more interested in the fees than in the Doctor’s patients, yet the fact that he was almost the only unmarried man in the neighbourhood gave him a certain importance. He was continually meeting Liddy when she went out to ride, and he looked very well on horseback, and gave her a great deal of good advice about the management of her horse. Perhaps but for that young Count in her dream, she would have got to understand what young Selby meant, though she scoffed at the adjective, and declared that he was not young, but as old as his father. He was the most entertaining person in the neighbourhood all the same, and the hero of Joan’s parties when they came round, one in summer, one about Christmas. These entertainments were pretty much alike, whatever was the time of year. Garden parties were not known in those days. In summer the windows were open, in winter the shutters shut over them and the curtains drawn. In other ways they were very much alike. There was a great round game carried on at the round table in the centre of the room. The tea had been served in the dining-room, so it did not interfere with the evening’s arrangements. Mr. Pilgrim’s family from Wyburgh were among the guests, and all the clergymen round, and any other notability who was not too great for the occasion. Few of the guests indeed could be called county people; but there were a good many who visited with the county people, and is not that very nearly the same? Joan, though she was homely enough, held her head somewhat high at her own table. The Selbys were but of moderate pretensions, but she never forgot that she was a Joscelyn. And she kept Liddy by her, not allowing any indiscriminate flirtations, and distinctly discouraging young Selby, who was her cousin by marriage, but had never won her heart. Mrs. Joscelyn never came to her daughter’s parties, though she was pleased to hear all about them; and it was only on condition that Liddy was to keep by her sister’s side that she was permitted to go, “You needn’t fear, mother, that she’ll meet with anyone she oughtn’t to meet with at my house,” Joan said, and she took care of her accordingly. It troubled her mind on the occasion to which we are about to refer, that a young man had come with Mrs. Pilgrim’s party, about whom she knew nothing. He was nice-looking, but she had not even caught his name. She could not help thinking it a little wrong of Mrs. Pilgrim to bring a stranger to such an assembly. If he had been in love with one of her girls, Joan allowed that would have made a difference; but there was not the least appearance that he was in love with one of the Pilgrim girls. They were very assiduous in their attention to him, pointing out everybody and making conversation for the young man, who, without being rude or disagreeable, held himself just a little aloof from the company in general, as if he had come there solely because he was brought, and had no special interest in the proceedings. His head, for he was tall, appearing steadily over Mrs. Pilgrim’s, at last began to irritate Mrs. Selby, who felt herself to be in every way a greater personage. She called her husband to her again and again to point out to him this wholly ineffective member of the party.

“What is he wanting here?” she said.

“My dear, what they all want—to enjoy himself,” Philip Selby replied.

“Enjoy himself—do you call that enjoyment? He looks as if he had swallowed a poker; and is never trusted for a moment out of the charge of two or three Pilgrims. I don’t think I’ll ask these people again.”

“They are very good sort of people, Joan; and considering the position in which they stood to your uncle Henry——”

“I’m very tired of Uncle Henry, Phil; besides, the girls didn’t stand in any position—and I never authorised them to bring a strange young man.”

“He will be after Amy or Tiny—or——”

“He’s after none of them. Can’t you see that with half an eye? It’s my belief he’s spying out for our Liddy. And what will mother say to me if I let her make acquaintance with a stranger? I said, ‘You needn’t fear, mother; she’ll meet nobody you don’t want her to meet at my house.’”

“Well, well,” said Philip Selby, soothingly; “there’s half the room between them; and nobody can say, my dear, that it’s your fault.”

“But that’s just what mother will do,” said Joan, with a puckered brow, as if her mother had been the most alarming critic in existence. She laughed at herself afterwards, and went to the table to superintend the round game, in which Liddy was deeply involved, seated by young Selby’s side. There was a strong sense of responsibility on Joan’s mind, or rather, she was a little cross. Her cakes had not come quite so well out of the oven as she intended, and Mrs. Doctor Selby had suggested a fault in the flavour of the tea. She went up to the players in a stormy state of mind. “Come, come,” she said, “you’re not sitting right. Liddy, you come over here and help little Ellen; all you strong ones are together. Raaf,” this was to young Selby, “stay where you are. I’ll put Miss Armstrong, she’s not playing at all, next to you.”

At this young Selby made a grimace, but Liddy tripped out of her place with all the alacrity possible, leaving her seat and devoting herself to little Ellen. She even gave her sister a smiling look of gratitude. “Thank you,” she said, in an under-tone, “but it was rude, Joan.”

“Now you are a deal better arranged, and the game will go faster; there will be no cheating,” Joan said. She did not care a bit for being called rude. Raaf Selby should know that he was not good enough for a Joscelyn whatever his cousin might be. “One’s enough,” she said to herself. Besides, she wanted for Liddy something that should be out of the common altogether. She herself had done very well in marriage. She had got an excellent man, with enough to be comfortable upon. But she did not feel that she would be satisfied with only so much for her little sister. Not that Raaf Selby at his best could hold a candle to Phil. He was not much except when he was on a horse; then she was obliged to allow he looked pretty well. But a man can’t always be on a horse’s back, and anywhere else he was not worth looking twice at; very different from Phil. Even Phil, however, much as she respected her husband, was not the kind of person she wanted for Liddy. A fairy prince, if any such fantastic being had ever existed in Joan’s steady imagination, was the sort of person who ought to be Lydia’s fate; a fine young fellow (young to start with), and handsome, and well off, and with an air above the rest of the world. Unawares, as her eyes went round her guests, they fell once more upon the tall young stranger behind Mrs. Pilgrim’s chair. Was that the kind of man? Well, if he had not been an intruder, a stranger, a hanger-on of the Pilgrims’ (though certainly not in love with either of the girls), that was the kind of person. She drew near Mrs. Pilgrim as this unsolicited thought arose in her mind. She was annoyed with herself to think that a person whom she did not know, and who had no right to be here, should thus have taken her eye.

“You are doing nothing, Amy,” she said to the eldest Miss Pilgrim; “I’m sure they want you in the game yonder—or you might give us some music. You and your sister might play a duet. I like to see everybody employed.”

“That is what I always say. You don’t let the grass grow beneath your feet, Mrs. Selby, neither in work nor in pleasure. I was just saying to——” here she made signs with her thumb, pointing to the stranger, who was inspecting the party from his eminence, and talking languidly to one of the girls. “He was introduced to you,” she added, in a whisper, “when he came in?”

“I should think,” said Joan, “that nobody would bring a strange man into my house without introducing him to me. But your friend is doing nothing either,” she said, with compunction, and a relenting of hospitality. “He has just got into a corner; and the evening’s lost when you once do that.”

“Oh, Mrs. Selby, he doesn’t know anybody. We promised we would take care of him if he came with us,” Amy Pilgrim said; and the object of Joan’s mingled interest and indignation laughed a little, and said that he hoped Mrs. Selby would not trouble herself, that he was very well there.

Then Joan sought her husband again. “Look at them,” she said, “all sitting in a corner with this strange man, as if they were above the rest of us: as if it was my lady Countess and her party from the Castle looking at the poor people’s amusements. I will never ask these Pilgrims again.”

“My dear, my dear,” said Philip Selby, “they are very good sort of people; and if they have a strange man with them that knows nobody, in civility what can they do?”

“Then in civility it’s your part to make him know somebody. Are you not the master of the house? Phil, you are lazy; you are not doing your duty,” Joan said, giving him a little push towards the corner in which the Pilgrims were enthroned. “If there is one thing I cannot put up with it is a knot of people in a company making their observations.” She was quite excited by the Pilgrims and their guest—“for he is their guest, and not mine, though it’s in my house,” Joan said to herself. But alas for her consistency! Next time that she disengaged herself from the lesser crowd round the card-table, Joan saw a sight which displeased and satisfied her at the same time. The group of the Pilgrims had broken up; that is to say, “the strange man” had been led or had strayed away, and Amy and Tiny, having no longer anyone to take care of, and describe the company to, had sought refuge at the card-table, and were much merrier, if not so fine, as in their former position. That was all very well; but, on the other hand, there was Lydia, seated demurely in a chair apart, with Raaf Selby standing on one side of her like a thunder-cloud, and on the other, talking and making himself very agreeable, the Pilgrims’ “strange young man.”

“Raaf,” said Joan, promptly, “you’re as bad as Phil; you’re taking no trouble. How is the game to go on without you to look after it, when it’s well known that you are far the best player here?”

“I have been playing all the evening. I think I may be permitted a little rest,” Raaf said, with a gloomy countenance. He was older and shorter than the strange young man, and not so tall, and there was a something about this personage which was above the level of young Selby. He could not tell what it was. He himself had more ornaments, he had a finer head of hair, and more shirt-front, but yet there was something. Lydia was replying very gravely to what the stranger said to her, but she gave him her whole attention, and the other girls had given evidence that they saw something in this new comer which was not in their familiar hero. He felt crestfallen, and he felt angry. He was not in a humour to be ordered about by Joan.

“Then sing us one of your songs,” Mrs. Selby said. “Things are going a bit slow; I don’t know what is the matter: or perhaps it’s only me that’s the matter. But I think things are going a bit slow.”

“That’s my opinion, too,” Raaf said; “but I don’t think it’s my fault.”

Upon which Lydia suddenly struck in, “Never mind how they are going, Joan, Joan! Let the people alone; they will amuse themselves. Mr. Brotherton has never been among the Fells before, and he wants to learn about us and all our ways. We are the natives—a kind of savages, but friendly; and talking a kind of dialect that can be understood with a little trouble. Come, Joan, and listen. It is nice to hear so much good of ourselves.”

This she said a little vindictively, with a glance at her new companion which brought the colour to his face. He had opened the conversation unguardedly, as fine people are often in the habit of doing with each other, by talking about the natives and the barbarous people. It was a compliment, if Lydia had known, to the superior air of her dress, and her appearance generally; how it is that one individual looks comme il faut, and another does not, is the most difficult of questions. Lydia in fact was no way superior to the rest: but the stranger thought she was a young person of the world, somebody who was in society, storm-stayed like himself.

“Do not take me at such a disadvantage,” he said; “if I spoke nonsense, it was because I did not know any better. I have got a relation somewhere among these good natives. You cannot think I do anything but respect them when that is the case.”

“Do you always respect your relations?” Lydia asked. She was perfectly disposed to flirt, and had an instinctive knowledge how to do it, though she had so little practice—no practice, it may be said; for young Selby was not light enough in hand to give her any experience, and he was almost the only individual with whom it would have been possible to flirt.

“If you are looking for friends,” said Joan, with immediate interest, “we have been here in this country since before the memory of man, and, if anybody can help you, we should be able to do it. Who is it you want?” She took a vacant chair and sat down by her sister—partly to guard Lydia, partly because she was full of curiosity about the strange young man—and partly, also, because Joan was a great genealogist, and knew everybody’s descent and how their grandfathers had married—when they had any grandfathers, it must be said.

“They are people of my own name,” said the stranger, “or, I should rather say—it is a distant cousin of my own name, who married somewhere hereabouts heaven knows how many years ago. My father recollects her well enough. She was a pretty girl in his day, and he told me to look her up; but as he had forgotten her present name (if she is still living), and she was married some forty years ago or more, I doubt if I am very likely to succeed.”

“Your—own name?” said Joan, with a little confusion. In her own house, and in the capacity of hostess to the stranger, she felt that it was rude not to know his name. She gave a glance of appeal at Liddy, who was mischievous, and in no humour to throw any light on the subject.

“Joan will tell you,” the girl said. “She knows everyone, and whom they married, and all their aunts and uncles. You have only to ask my sister.”

More and mere confused grew Joan. She looked at Liddy with reproachful eyes; she even addressed a plaintive glance to Raaf, who did not understand her embarrassment, and for the moment was too angry to have helped if he had. “Of your—own name?” she said, faltering.

“Yes; forty years ago, or so, she was Lydia Brotherton.”

“Why, it’s mother!” said Joan, her countenance beaming. There was a victory over everybody, Pilgrims and all; while the young man, starting, turned round with amazed pleasure, and looked, not at Joan, who spoke, however, but at Lydia, who listened, looking up at him, as much astonished as he.

“Mother!” Lydia said, and her fair countenance brightened into smiles from which all the mischievous meaning had gone.

“Well, that’s as easy a find as I ever heard of,” cried Joan, “and how lucky you should have come here! Mother will be pleased! She has not seen any of her relations for years. She was an only child, so she had never any near friends. How pleased she will be, to be sure! The best thing you can do is to stay here all night, and ride over with Liddy to-morrow: she is going home to-morrow. Bless me, I think I’ll go too, just to see mother so pleased!”

“It is a delightful discovery,” said young Brotherton. “How fortunate that I mentioned it now; my father charged me to find out—but I confess I had forgotten till this moment. How lucky I thought of it! I am afraid I must go home to-night with these good people who have been so kind to me; but I will come back in the morning. It is delightful to fall among kindred,” the young man said, looking at Lydia, whose face reflected all manner of pleasant sensations, surprises, a delightful sense of novelty and exhilaration. She had but few relatives, and a new cousin was delightful—especially a cousin so completely creditable, a gentleman, one about whom there could not be two opinions. The Pilgrims, who had been so proud of this “strange young man,” had altogether disappeared now, and Raaf was left entirely out of the little group of three, all so pleased with themselves and each other. Joan forgot even those duties which usually she performed with such devotion, leaving the round game and its players to themselves, and no longer thinking either of the duet of the Pilgrim girls, or Raaf’s song.

“I took the greatest notice of you from the moment you came in,” she said. “I cannot tell you how it was. It’s not that there is any family likeness, for I can’t see any. Liddy favours mother, and there’s not a feature alike in her and you; but all the same I took notice of you from the first. I didn’t catch your name, or it might have made me think—but there was something. I was more vexed than pleased with those Pilgrims; but all the same, when I caught sight of you——”

“It was kindred at first sight,” said the young man.

“That’s a new way of putting it,” said Joan, laughing; and it glanced through her mind that she had already thought, if he had not been with the Pilgrims, that this might be the right sort of man; and now it was clear that he did not belong to the Pilgrims. She gave a rapid glance from him to Lydia, and back again. As yet she had not the least idea who he was. She had never seen any of the Brotherton connections, and knew nothing about them. Mrs. Joscelyn had often told her children that she had no relations nearer than cousins, and with them even she had kept up no acquaintance. Her children were entirely in the dark about the family. They knew that there was a Sir John who gave dignity to it; but that was all. Joan was very straightforward, but she did not like to plunge at once into details, and ask him who he was. But when she had talked a great deal to the new relative, and arranged the expedition to the White House to-morrow, she went back to Mrs. Pilgrim, who sat somewhat deserted in her corner, a little humiliated by the desertion of her “gentleman,” with the most cheerful cordiality. “I did not catch the gentleman’s name,” she said, “when you brought him in; but what a good thing you brought him! He’s a cousin of ours, and came here looking for mother; for her own friends live far away, and we’ve long lost sight of them. Of course,” said Joan, with a little artifice, “he had no notion whose house he was coming to. There’s always a great confusion in a family about your married name.”

“Came here—looking for——? I thought he came looking for a place for the shooting,” Mrs. Pilgrim said, confounded. She could scarcely allow herself to believe it. It had been a distinction to bring a new “gentleman,” a person of such distinguished appearance, in her train; and to have him taken from her bodily, nay, carried off soul and body, so to speak, not indeed to her enemy’s side, but at all events into another family, was hard to bear.

CHAPTER III.
CONFIDENCES.

THEY were still at breakfast at Heatonshaw next morning when the new cousin came to the door. He was on a good horse, which was a thing they all remarked at once, being learned in such matters—and looked handsomer in daylight than he had done at night. The household had been late on the previous evening—a party being a matter of such rare occurrence that it was considered only right to make the best of it, both in kitchen and parlour, and to bustle half the night “putting away.” The whole company had dispersed at a little after eleven; but next morning there was as much license as if it had been the morning after a ball. And the household felt equally dissipated; everything is comparative; eleven o’clock at night was in Heatonshaw as bad as three or four in the morning at another place. So they were still around the breakfast table when young Brotherton rode up.

“That’s not Pilgrim’s horse,” Mr. Selby said. “It must be out of his own stables; and he did not get that for nothing.” Even Liddy got up from where she was sitting, a little out of the way, to peep at the new arrival. He came in a few minutes after whip in hand.

“You are not so early, Mrs. Selby, as I feared. I made a very early start lest you should be gone before I could get here.”

“We are not so early as all that,” said Joan, “and we’re not used to have our home disturbed, and the house turned upside-down, as it was last night. I’m one that thinks it a duty, where people have a nice house and plenty to do with, to have your friends from time to time. But it’s a great trouble both before and after. Not a servant in this house was in their bed till long past twelve o’clock at night; and, poor things, we could not be exacting this morning,” Joan added, apologetically. “Liddy, if Mr. Brotherton will not take anything, we will, maybe, better get ready to go.”

“Do not hurry for me,” the young man said. He was quite at his ease talking to Philip Selby, whom it pleased his wife to see putting on mildly the air of a man of the world when any invasion came from that big place into the Fell-country. When they had gone to “put on their things,” young Brotherton made himself very agreeable to the master of the house. He spoke of my “cousins” as if he had known them all his life: though all the time there was a look of semi-amusement on his face. He had stumbled into a new life without knowing anything about it. The servants up till after twelve, which was spoken of with bated breath as a wonderful interruption of rule; the master and mistress, who “were not exacting” after that tremendous vigil; the freshness and sweetness of the rural place, all produced a great effect upon him. He thought it a kind of Arcadia, an Arcadia dashed with reminiscences of hot supper, and some vagaries of homely fashion which struck Brotherton as more amusing than all the similar vagaries which he had come across before. When the ladies came down again, Joan attired in a bonnet which was more striking in its colours and composition than was common, ready to drive her phaeton to the White House, and Lydia in her riding habit, his pleasure in the sunshiny expedition he was about to make was as great as his amusement in finding himself a member of the primitive society, almost of the family, which was so simple and so kind. He watched the packing of the phaeton with laughing eyes. Lydia’s box, containing her evening dress no doubt, was carefully fastened on behind, and in front, in the vacant seat, was a basket, in which there were a number of delicacies from the feast, which Mrs. Selby thought “Mother might like: or if she doesn’t care for them herself, it will always be a pleasure to give them away,” said Joan; “though you must not think, Mr. Brotherton, that I am forgetting our own poor folk. A little bit that is out of the way, that comes from the party—everybody likes that.” He helped to lift the basket into the phaeton almost with reverence. The feast of last night became beautiful to him in this light. How many had he seen, much more delicate and costly, of which the fragments went to the dogs, nobody dreaming of the “poor folk!” Mr. Selby put Liddy upon her horse while the young stranger was helping with the basket, and this he felt to be a sacrifice on his part, in consonance with the kind and homely charity that breathed about the place. Then Philip Selby promised to walk over to join his wife in the afternoon, and the party went off, Mrs. Selby in advance, talking cheerily to her horse, bidding him to get on, and not bother her with a whip. Liddy and the young man set out soberly together. They did not say much for the first mile or two. Now that they were alone together they were a little abashed by each other. He thought her the prettiest girl he had ever seen—which was by no means the case, for Liddy, though very pretty, was not a wonder of loveliness; and she thought him, with more reason, the finest gentleman that had ever came across her path. She asked herself how it was that he was so different from Raaf Selby? but could not make any reply. He was like nobody she had ever seen. “This is what a gentleman is, a real gentleman, the kind that goes to Court and sees the Queen; the kind that is in Parliament and rules the country; the kind that everybody tries to be like, and that Raaf Selby would fain be taken for—he!” Liddy said to herself; and she was abashed, and did not talk much to her companion. Indeed it was not till they were near the White House that she ventured to ask a question which had been long on her lips.

“Are you a member of Parliament, Mr. Brotherton?”

“Oh, no,” he said, laughing; “it is my father you are thinking of. I have never attained that dignity. I ought to have told you more about myself before I asked admittance; but Mrs. Selby was so kind. I am a briefless barrister, if you know what that is.”

“A lawyer with nothing to do,” said Liddy; “one reads about them in books.”

Young Brotherton laughed. “It is as good a definition as another,” he said; “but sometimes it means only some one who has pretended to study for a profession which is all a pretence together, and never comes to anything. That is my case: and I have been wandering over all the world.”

“In Italy?” asked Lydia, with eager eyes.

“Oh, yes. You are fond of Italy? I daresay we shall find we have sympathies on that point. My mother is a great devotee; she would live there all the year round if we would let her. I wonder which is your favourite spot.”

“Oh!” cried Lydia, with all her heart in her voice, “I have no favourite spot; I only know it by name. Italy is where everything happens—all the stories are there: and besides,” she added, “I have a private reason too.”

He looked at her with some curiosity, and a great deal of interest. What could the private reason of a young girl be? “You have, perhaps,” he said, “friends there?”

Lydia shook her head. “If you are our cousin, Mr. Brotherton, and going to know all about us—”

“If I am your cousin! Do you think I am making a false claim, Miss Joscelyn?” he said.

“—then you will soon know about Harry,” said Lydia, going on in the same breath. “I have a brother who went away a great many years ago. We don’t know where he is, or anything about him; but I am sure if I could go abroad I should find him—that is why I am always so anxious to talk to anyone who has been there.”

“Where?” he said.

“Abroad.” Lydia said the word with all simplicity. “Abroad” meant everything to her. It meant the place in which Harry was, and where she should certainly find him if she got there. When she said “Italy” she meant much the same thing. Not Italy, of which she knew little, except by the stories in the “Book of Beauty;” but a vague and beautiful place in which everything that was wonderful happened, and in which it would be natural that this should happen too.

But Brotherton, whose knowledge was more precise, was puzzled. He did not know whether to follow out this line of conversation, which promised to become intimate, or to go back to subjects personal to himself. He had no right to inquire into the story of the family prodigal, he thought; but still, as the door had been opened to him, how was he to turn from it? “I have gone abroad since ever I can remember,” he said; “my mother, as I tell you, is never so happy in England as out of it. She is rather an invalid, and she cannot bear the cold. When I was a boy I scarcely knew where my home was.”

“Are there many of you?” asked Liddy, full of interest. She did not understand a small family, and a vision came on her of sisters, girls like herself, companions such as she had never had; but this new idea was alarming as well as delightful, and she could not help fearing that young ladies who were equal to her new friend would think themselves above her; therefore it was almost a relief, though at the same time a disappointment, when he laughed and said, “I am all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the brothers too,”—words which she thought she had heard somewhere else, but was not clear about. And then they went on again quite silently for a time, the wide valley all about them, the air breathing in their faces, the great world all to themselves. Joan, driving in her steady way, was round the next corner, well ahead, and there was nothing but these two figures stalking on in the sunshine, with their shadows behind them. Liddy felt that she did not care to talk. The sensation was sweet, and tranquil, and friendly, and furnished all that was required, without any talking at all. It is impossible to describe what an interruption it was, a kind of outrage upon the quiet, when, as they went round that next corner, skirting the hedgerows, they were suddenly met face to face by young Selby, on his big brown horse. Even Lydia, not too favourably disposed towards him, had been obliged to admit on former occasions that Raaf Selby looked well on his big horse. But to-day he positively offended her by his appearance. There is no class of men in the world so delightful, so helpful, so kind, so modest about their own merits, and of so much service to all the rest of the world, as doctors; but yet there is a compound of rudeness, jauntiness, pretension, and vulgarity to be found now and then in a country practitioner, which can nowhere else be paralleled. Raaf Selby was not always like this, nor was it at all the impression which he made upon the general mind, or even upon Liddy’s, who, in other times, had considered him, as all the country did, “quite a gentleman.” But when he met them now he had a red face (which was not his fault) and the air of having been up all night (which, if it had been true, would have been a virtue in him), and looked altogether like a rural dandy trying to be something which he was not.

“Hullo, Miss Liddy,” he said, “I suppose you kept it up to all the hours last night after the rest of us were gone?”

“I don’t know what there was to keep up,” Liddy said, with an indignant blush; upon which young Selby laughed loudly.

“Ah, I daresay; but I know,” he said, with an open look at Brotherton, a look full of insolence and jealousy—and he gave a great laugh. “I was out of it last night; but I haven’t always been out of it,” he said.

Lydia was a girl not at all disposed in her own person to submit to any impertinence, but she got alarmed when she saw the gathering clouds on her companion’s face. “I think you are alluding to something I don’t understand,” she said, firmly, “but I need not ask what it is, to detain you. We have got to keep up with Joan. Did you see Joan? She has got the lead of us, and we are bound to make up to her now.”

“Yes, I saw she had got judiciously out of hearing,” said young Selby, with another laugh. “That’s the first duty of a chaperon.”

In this he meant no particular offence, but spoke with the rough bantering which was not disliked by ordinary country girls, just sharpened with jealousy and envy, and the sting of seeing how thoroughly harmonious and sympathetic Liddy and her new companion looked. As for Brotherton he kept apart as far as he could. Good manners in another generation would have suggested a use of his whip. Good manners now restrained him from taking any notice, though his blood boiled.

“I don’t know about a chaperon’s duties,” Liddy said; “I think we must go on. Good morning, Mr. Selby,” and they went on, leaving him in the middle of the road, staring. He could not help looking after them, though he did not like the sight. Two handsome young people, in complete accord and harmony, moving along together as if to music, with no noise nor boisterous gaiety, as would have been the case had Selby himself ridden home with Liddy after the party, but in perfect friendliness and union, as he thought.

“Good morning,” he called after them, “and my congratulations to Joan upon her success last night.”

He was so bitter that he could not forbear from sending this last shaft after them. Who was this fellow, that he should come in and spoil other people’s chances? Selby recalled furiously to his recollection, incidents of a similar kind that he had known. A swell comes down, he pokes himself between a foolish lass and some honest man that likes her; and when he has turned her head he rides away! The country gallant was aware that he had acted this fine part himself in a lower class, when he had merely laughed at the lass’s credulity and the fury of the clown who was her true lover, but whom she could not endure after being courted by a gentleman; but he did not laugh when the case was his own. This swell, of course, would go away; but Liddy’s head would be turned; and she was a girl who would have a good bit of money, besides being the prettiest girl in the county. Joscelyn had been making money of late, everybody said, and there was her Uncle Henry’s money, which must be divided sooner or later; and all this to be put out of an honest suitor’s reach by a young fellow who would not even take it himself, but only spoil the lass for a better man. This was what was rankling in Selby’s heart as he rode away.

“Is Mr. Selby a relation of yours?” Brotherton asked.

“Only of Joan’s—my sister’s—husband. It is not bragging,” said Lydia, with a little blush, yet a slight elevation of her head as well, “but we are very different from the Selbys, Mr. Brotherton. Many people thought Joan made a very poor marriage. I don’t think so, for she is fond of Philip, and he is so good; but the Joscelyns are the oldest family—I don’t speak out of vanity—the oldest family in the county. We used to be great people,” said Liddy, laughing, but very serious all the same, “in the old days.”

“I always knew,” said Brotherton, “that it was an old name.”

“Oh, there are all sorts of people who have old names; but we are the real people; if you stay long we will show you the old tower. There have been Joscelyns in it ever since there was any history at all.”

She gave her head a slight fling backwards, and laughed again, half at herself—but yet Lydia meant every word she said. Young Brotherton, for his part, had been brought up in more enlightened circles, and would have thought of himself that he failed in that “sense of humour” which is the modern preservation from all absurdities, had he spoken of his family in this way. He held his tongue on the subject, and thought that he esteemed one name as much as another, and was no respector of persons; and he laughed in his heart at Lydia’s brag, and admired, with an indulgent sense of superiority, to see how this sentiment of family pride kindled her eyes and elevated her head. But all the same he was impressed by it. It produced its effect upon him, as it does upon every Englishman. He liked the boast, of which he did not fail to see the ludicrous side, and which his more cultivated taste would have entirely prevented him from putting forth in his own person—but in Liddy he liked it, and laughed, yet was more pleased with her and his connection with her. She carried it in her face, he thought, and in every movement of her untutored, yet graceful, carriage. It did not occur to him to think that homely Joan, soberly speeding along the road in her phaeton, had all the same advantages of blood.

Mrs. Joscelyn came out to meet them at the door. She liked to see her Liddy get down beaming, from her horse—the horse as handsome as herself, which Mrs. Joscelyn began for the first time to see the beauty of, now that her child was the rider. She did not know who the young man was, and she did not much care. Her mind had not been awakened to the matrimonial question, though, to tell the truth, no wild beast, no lion with a devouring maw, would have wakened so much alarm in Mrs. Joscelyn as the appearance of a lover for Liddy. That would have inferred the saddest fate for herself, the destruction of her present sweet life, and all the late happiness which had come to her in compensation for her troubles; but fortunately such an idea did not enter into her mind. It was a pleasant arrival. Joan, always active and bright, lifting down with her own hands her big basket, stood in the hall watching too the arrival of the young people, yet calling out to the groom some prudent suggestions about her own horse, which was being led away to the stables. She was as well informed about all the necessities of the stable as any of them, and took the deepest interest in the welfare of the animals, and she stepped forward to pat the fine neck of Liddy’s steed as her mother got the young rider in her arms.

“Did you ever see a prettier creature?” she said to Brotherton, “and I would not say but there were two of them. But mother’s just a fool about Liddy. She thinks there’s nothing like her on the face of the earth. Mother, here’s a relation come to see you,” she added, turning round.

Mrs. Joscelyn gave a little cry. Brotherton was standing against the light, so that his features were not at first decipherable. She made a quick step forward, throwing out her hands, then grew suddenly pale.

“I don’t know what I was thinking of,” she said, faintly. “I am sure I beg your friend’s pardon, Joan, and yours too.”

“I see what you’re thinking of, mother—but there’s nothing in it,” Joan said. “This is young Mr. Brotherton, who’s come to the Fells asking for a cousin of his name that married here long ago. If it’s not you, I don’t know who it can be—and I’ve brought him to see you. It would be his father you knew, for he’s but a young lad himself, as you can see.”

“He’s kindly welcome,” Mrs. Joscelyn said, and he was brought into the parlour, and a great deal of family explanation was gone through. Mrs. Joscelyn had her pride of birth, as well as her daughter, and it had always been a secret pleasure to her to think that there was a Sir John in her family, who might turn up some time or other and balance the faded Joscelyn pretensions with a far more tangible living dignity. For her own part, she did not know anything about Sir John; but it gratified her mightily to think that he had remembered he had a cousin married in the Fell-country. “There could not be any—stranger that it would give me more pleasure to see,” she said.

Young Brotherton, for his part, was delighted with his old cousin. It was from her, he perceived with pleasure, that Liddy had taken her willowy grace, and the refined and delicate features which bore little resemblance to those of Mrs. Selby. He was in a humour to be pleased with everything he saw. When the master of the house appeared, he thought him the model of an old North-country squire, rough, perhaps, but manly and full of character, as suited that strong-minded country. The plainness of manners and living, the woman-servant, not very adroit, that served the dinner—which was plainly dinner, and not luncheon—the atmosphere of farm and stables outside of the house, instead of park and pleasure-grounds, all struck him in the most favourable light. Liddy had thrown glamour in the young man’s eyes; he saw them all through her. These, the unusual features in her surroundings, appeared to him in the form of characteristic traits and country peculiarities, not as symptoms of a level of society lower than his own. It was all piquant, novel, delightful, and when he was asked to stay, a grace which Joscelyn put forth to the wonder and admiration of all the household, he accepted the invitation with eagerness. Mrs. Selby, for one, could not get over her astonishment.

“Nay, when father’s asked him there’s not a word to say,” she cried. “Father! I would as soon have believed that you and me, Phil, would have been asked to take tea with the Queen.”

CHAPTER IV.
BEGINNING.

BROTHERTON stayed a week at the White House—to the great mortification of the Pilgrims at Wyburgh, whose guest he had been. Nobody likes to have their visitors interfered with, or that a new acquaintance, whom they have themselves introduced and brought out, so to speak, in society, should desert them for a new circle. The girls and the mother were alike indignant, and the incident even had the effect of quickening the action of the father, and making him more impatient of the delays in respect to old Mr. Joscelyn’s estate. But this had little effect upon the household at the White House, which for the moment was more happy and peaceful than perhaps it had ever been before. It was the beginning of one of those new chapters in life which revive the interest of the old story. Poor Mrs. Joscelyn had lived through many such, but they had been in most cases not of the pleasant, but painful kind. Her blood had been quickened in her veins, her heart driven into wild beating, as one crisis after another occurred in the family life. But now everything was changed. Lydia had become to her another self. She was not sure whether it was not herself again, glorified, elevated, made beautiful by present youth and infinite hope, which was always about her—moving with her step for step, talking, even thinking with her: the same thoughts rising to their lips. Between two sisters such a dual life is sweet; but to a mother it is a recompense for all the pangs of life, which are seldom few or small. She was not sure that it was not herself who spoke, and thought, and smiled in Lydia; but only a self far more firm, erect, and self-supporting than she had ever been. Lydia was not afraid of anything, and of Ralph Joscelyn least of all. This of itself made the strangest difference. It gave a flavour and fragrance to their mingled life. The mother felt herself more brave and more strong in her child; and now romance was arriving to her late in the same way. Ralph Joscelyn’s wooing had been a rough one. During its course the pretty, drooping Lydia of those days had been charmed by its very abruptness, and considered the peremptory passion a double compliment to herself, and to the power of love in subduing the strong. She had liked all the silly similes, the lion enchained, the giant deprived of his strength, and had believed in her foolish heart that her half-savage hero would be always in her toils—however rough to others, yet to herself the gentlest of the gentle. From this foolish dream there had been a summary awakening; and all her long life since had been calculated to convince the romantic woman that romance existed only in her dreams. But now another kind of awakening was coming to her. Youth had come back with its visions, and Arcadia, and love. The young man who was her own kith and kin (which of itself was sweet) was also, as becomes a young man, something of her own kind. He was full of poetry, and sympathy, and enthusiasm: it was not after her old-fashioned mode, but yet it was not the common strain of prose to which she had been accustomed. To see his eyes turn to her Lydia was to Mrs. Joscelyn like the revival of all her own maiden fancies; and the affectionate worship which he gave to herself completed the charm. Perhaps she was happier than Lydia in those early days of wooing. She saw the dawn of admiration and enthusiasm in his eyes, when Lydia herself thought of him only as a sort of advanced playfellow, a something new in his youth and pleasantness. Mrs. Joscelyn saw it all from the beginning; she felt from the beginning that it was written in heaven. It was half like a story which she was reading in snatches, or chapters, a single page at a time, always longing to go on with it, to see what the next step was to be, to anticipate the end.

As for Lydia herself, after the little excitement of the arrival, and the pleasure of bringing this new cousin to her mother—the most delightful present that could be thought—of she subsided sedately into her usual life, and treated him as a new companion, not doubting his interest in her simple occupations. His servant came over from Wyburgh with his baggage, which was a shock to the primitive household; but as the man was rather in charge of the horse than of his master, and that is a point on which princes and grooms may fraternise, the alarm was soon over. Brotherton wanted, it appeared, to find a shooting box, a little place in which he could establish himself for the autumn. He explained that he was not rich enough to aspire to a Scotch moor, and modestly permitted it to be understood that the Duke’s youngest son was his intimate friend, and that it was chiefly to be near him, and share his shootings, that he had chosen this part of the world. With the hospitality of primitive regions, Ralph Joscelyn would have taken him in permanently, and allowed him to be an inmate of the White House; but his wife retained enough of her old breeding to see that this expedient was undesirable, even though her heart stirred faintly with a hope that in that case the Duchess might have called, which is the chief sign of belonging to the aristocracy in these countries. The Duchess had never given her this sign of recognition, which had been a life-long smart to the poor lady. What did she care about such distinctions now? but yet for the sake of Liddy, she said to herself. To have her Lydia asked to a ball at the Castle would indeed be something to reward her for living, to make her feel that now she could die in peace. Mrs. Joscelyn did not say anything about this hope—for the disappointment, if nothing came of it, would have been very severe she felt, too great a trial to expose her child to: but she cherished it in her heart of hearts. And in the meantime they made every effort they could to find for this new relation the lodging he wanted. It was Lydia at last who suggested the old Birrenshead, the house which had been Uncle Harry’s, but which had not been inhabited by anybody but Isaac Oliver in the memory of man.

“It is a very tumble-down old place,” she said, deprecating, “but it is only two miles from here.”

“Oh, if it is only two miles from here—!” cried the young man, eagerly. This was one of those elliptical forms of speech which he had begun to employ unawares, and which only Mrs. Joscelyn understood. She smiled within herself, but she said nothing; and it was agreed that he should walk there next day and see what accommodation the place possessed. The name of it threw a little tremor over Mrs. Joscelyn, although she had smiled. And next morning, when with great simplicity, and without any thought of harm, Lydia set out with the stranger to show him the way, she told him the circumstances in which the family stood, as she had before revealed to him the fact of her brother’s disappearance. It did not occur either to Lydia or to her mother that there was anything wrong, anything out of the common, in showing young Brotherton the way to Birrenshead. It seemed indeed of all things the simplest and most natural. She walked by his side as seriously as if the young man had been her own grandfather, with all the dignity of a princess in her own country. Nor did anyone in the village think it strange. They saw her pass, and wondered who it was who accompanied her over the bridge; but that was all.

“This is part of the property,” she said gravely, “which was left to my poor brother whom I told you of. That is what made my mother look so serious. She does not like to hear about Uncle Henry’s property. If we do not hear something of Harry soon, it will have to be divided, they say.”

“And that is a grief to her?” Brotherton said, sympathetically.

“Oh, Mr. Brotherton, think! to be the heir of your own child—do you wonder that she cannot bear it? They say we should all have our share, father and mother too. He does not say much, but he thinks more than he says, and I am sure he would rather die than touch it. But my brothers,” said Lydia, with a sigh, “my other brothers, don’t think so. They want us to yield and consent that Harry is dead. But that is what I will never do.”

Brotherton looked at her animated face with admiring interest. “You must have been very fond of this brother,” he said.

“I scarcely remember him; but I am sure I should find him,” cried Lydia. “You will say that is nonsense; but then I have been my mother’s only companion all these years, and she will never be happy till she has seen Harry again. She has not had a very happy life; perhaps she has not always understood—and then no one has understood her. I must, I must get her some happiness before she dies!”

There was a glow of tender enthusiasm about the girl which touched her companion deeply. “I think,” he said, “she is happy in you. It would be strange if she were not,” he added, half under his breath.

This brought a wave of colour over Lydia’s face. “She is a little more happy in me; but she will not be really happy till she sees Harry.”

“And if——”

“Don’t say so, Mr. Brotherton, please! Don’t think so even. Do you imagine if he had been —— that mother would not know? If I could only go abroad I know I should find him. Here is old Isaac Oliver, old Uncle Henry’s man. He will let you see the place; and if he is cross you will not mind? He has been here so long that he thinks it is his own.”

They were walking along the edge of a field of corn, on a little footpath so narrow that here and there they had to walk singly. The wind, which swept the tall rustling crop in waves like breath coming and going, blew the pale yellow heads against them as they went along in pleasant contact with this wealth and freshness of nature. The corn was still pale in tint, ripening slowly under the northern sun, with a glimmer of red poppies under the surface like the woven under-ground of some rich Indian stuff. As Lydia spoke, an old man became visible between the corn and the hedgerow, pushing his stooping shoulders along before him with a sidelong movement like a crab. His head was bent to one side, his footsteps shuffling. Ten years had told upon Isaac. He did not take off his hat when he saw Liddy approaching, such a ceremonial being scarcely necessary to the familiar intercourse of the country, but he nodded amiably, and made signs of welcome with his hand. As, however, the path widened a little just at that moment, and young Brotherton, making a quicker step, appeared suddenly at Lydia’s side, Isaac, who had not seen him before, was greatly startled. He stopped short in his crab-like course to stare at the new comer. He fell back a step or two and screwed his stooping head aloft in a sidelong attitude. Then he gave vent to a shrill, prolonged “E-eh!” which penetrated the air like a skewer. “So he’s coomed back,” the old man said.

“Who has come back?” said Lydia, startled and eager.

“Lord, Master, give us a grip o’ your hand. You’re no Master Harry now, you’re master’s sel’. T’ ould Master left it all to ye, as I said he would if you’d let him be; but you never would listen, nor think on——” When he had got so far, old Isaac paused. His head had sunk a little from its first energy of motion, but he kept one eye screwed up and shining, and his mouth twisted upward at one corner. Here, however, he paused, and a cloud came over his face. “Miss Liddy,” he said, reproachfully, “you might have tellt me it wasn’t him.”

“Who did you think it was, Isaac? It is Mr. Brotherton, a——distant cousin. Did you think——? Oh, tell me, is he like, is he like——?”

The old man recovered himself gradually. He gave a grin which seemed to twist upwards from his mouth to his little twinkling eyes.

“Not a feature in his face,” he said, with a growl of angry laughter, “not a bit, no more nor I’m like. I’m just an old fool. I take anyone for him. Ne’er a soul comes down t’ Fells but I say, it’s him, as if he was coming from t’ skies. A fine joke that; and him t’ prodigal son, a good joke; to look for him from t’ skies! He should come from t’ other place, Miss Liddy, up from t’ ground.”

“But he was no prodigal,” said Liddy, indignantly. “He did not go away for any harm, Isaac, you know that!”

“I know a’ about it, a’ about it,” said the old man. “Step forward, Sir, into the light. If you keep there dangling behind her—Lord! but I’ll think it’s you after a’.”

“You must be like Harry,” cried Lydia, turning round quickly upon her companion. “When she saw you first, my mother started too.”

“He’s about the same age,” said old Isaac, “and tallness—no more, not a hair. Don’t you speak to me, Miss Liddy. If I dunnot know him, who does? I brought him up, though you wouldn’t think it. I put him on a pony the first time. I gied him most of his lessons, out of t’ school. But this isn’t him,” the old man said indignantly, “it’s not him, I tell ye. Don’t you think to impose on me.”

“Isaac,” said Lydia, “will you let Mr. Brotherton see the house? He wants to live here for a little. Mother thinks you might put in a little furniture, and make him comfortable.”

“Com—fortable!” said the old man, prolonging the word with a half-laughing, half-angry cry; “and it was your mother said it? If he likes t’ bide with the bats and the rats, he may be com—fortable. There’s been nobody else there as long’s I mind. Do you mean,” he added, suddenly screwing up his eye into a little spark of red fire, “that she’s consented, and Miss Joan, and you? I’ll not b’lieve it; and who,” he asked fiercely, “is to get this share?”

“You must not speak so to me. We have not consented, and I never will consent. But this gentleman does not understand what we are talking about,” said Lydia; “take him into the house and show him what rooms there are, and I will go and see your wife.”

“Oh, ay,” said Isaac, “speak to t’ missis, you’ll find her in a fine way. If she hadna gotten t’ meekest man, next to Job, that was ever in this ill world—a pictur and a pattern. But you’ll see for yourself, Miss Liddy; you can drop a word about t’ gentleman to soothen her down. Come this way round, come this way round, it’s the best way.”

Old Isaac had turned in front of them, and was creeping along by the side of the path scarcely so high as the corn, his battered old hat about the same height as the yellow ears. When the cornfield ended they came out abruptly upon a grey old house, surrounded by a small rough square of grass, in which were some fine trees. The house looked as if it had been forgotten there, like an old plough. It had a square, respectable portico, with a pediment above it, and rows of windows chiefly broken, the lower ones closed with shutters which were falling to pieces. A huge elm-tree stood up at one corner, throwing its shadow over half the house; behind it were traces of the trees of an orchard; but the fields all round had encroached on the place, potatoes were growing within a stone’s throw of the great door, and everything bearing witness of its deposition and reduction from a human centre of life to a mere wreck and encumbrance on the earth.

“Ay, ay,” said old Isaac, shaking his head, “they’d just like to pull it down and no leave one stone on another, like Jerusalem in t’ Bible; but the walls is good, and the woodwork’s good, and it would last his time and mine—and far more if Mr. Harry would come home, as he ought.”

“Then you think he’ll come home,” said young Brotherton, not knowing what to say.

“Wha said he wasna coming home, why should he no come home?” said Isaac, screwing up his eye once more into a red spark of angry light. “Them that say so know nothing about it, I can tell you that, Master. Them that are of that opinion have nothing to found it on. Who understands Master Harry like me, unless, maybe, it was his mother? Well, his mother and me, we’re both expecting him. That should be an answer, except to them that arguys just for the sake of arguyment,” the old man said, fiercely. “Will you come in and see the house?”

To Brotherton it had begun to seem, by this time, as if the house and all about it, the very skies overhead, had darkened. He did not quite know at first what was the cause. It was some cloud that had come over the sun; or was there some obscurity about the house, some shadow of fate, which darkened the skies at midday? It seemed to him suddenly that nothing could be more dreary than the aspect of the place altogether, though before Lydia disappeared round the broken bit of garden-wall, it had seemed so inviting and desirable. But he did not ask himself if Lydia’s disappearance had anything to do with this sudden change: all he said to himself was, “it is only two miles from the White House,” and, strengthened by this reminder, he went on with courage into the dark portal. It was, as Liddy had said, a very tumble-down house. There was a dirty and ragged carpet on the floor, sometimes moving in waves when the windows were opened; a table stood in the centre of the largest sitting-room, and the chairs were put round, as if some sober party had just risen from them. This was on the first floor, in the drawing-room of the house; behind it were some bed-rooms scarcely more inviting; the dust rose in clouds when the air was admitted, the furniture seemed dropping to pieces. Brotherton stood at the door of one room after another, with a blank stare at them. They had but one quality; they were within two miles of the White House.

“And do you think they will suit you?” Lydia asked, coming back to him when his inspection was over.

She had not been in dusty places like those which he had just left, but came round the corner of the garden wall, looking so fresh and bright, that somehow that cloud over the sun disappeared in a moment, and the whole landscape brightened, and the dust went out of his throat. He had been feeling half choked, but he felt so no more. He had thought that they would not do at all; but now a sort of heavenly suitability seemed to come to them all at once, and it appeared to him in a moment that, if he could have the choice of all sorts of lodgings, these dreary rooms were those which would suit him best.

“They will do beautifully,” he said, with much cheerfulness. “So far as I can see they are the very thing I want; and then so near the White House! What is two miles? I shall be able to walk over constantly—if you will let me,” he added, in a softer tone.

“Of course we will let you,” said Lydia, sedately. “We shall miss you so much that we shall be very happy to have you whenever you like. But were they not in very bad order? the furniture dreadful? and everything dropping to pieces?”

“I did not see it,” said young Brotherton, stoutly. “They were, I daresay, a little dusty; when a place has been uninhabited for a long time—I suppose nobody has lived there lately?”

“Nobody has lived there since I can remember—oh, and not for a long time before. Even Uncle Henry never lived there. I think I must have been silly to bring you, for it can’t be fit to live in now I think of it; and while matters are undecided about poor Harry they will not do anything. Oh, I am afraid mother and I were hasty in thinking it would do.”

“On the contrary,” said young Brotherton, feeling in the enthusiasm of the moment as if it had been a palace which he had just quitted, “it is everything I require. Perhaps,” he added, modestly, as if by an afterthought, “they would not mind—sweeping it out.”

“I spoke to Jane, that is Isaac’s wife. Isaac is a very funny old man, but he is frightened for his wife. She keeps him right. And she will scrub it, and sweep it, and dust it, and make it as clean as a new pin. Oh, you may be quite sure of that. And then, at first, you can take your meals with us, the White House is so near—only two miles, what is that?”

“Nothing,” said Brotherton, with enthusiasm. Then he added, “I must not tire you out. I shall do very well. I can get everything I want here.”

“Oh, no; until you get used to Jane, and accustomed to the cooking, and all that—I know these things are of consequence to gentlemen,” Lydia said, with a soft smile of feminine superiority, “you must come and take your meals at the White House. But Jane Oliver is quite a good cook,” she added, encouragingly. Brotherton’s heart had sunk within him at the mention of Jane’s cookery. The cookery could not but be a terrible necessity in such a place. But he scorned to show any such weakness.

“I am sure she is,” he said, cheerfully. “I feel certain that I shall be in the best of quarters. Is there a ghost?”

“A ghost! why should there be a ghost?” cried Lydia, in surprise. Then she added, with a little dignity, “There was never anybody injured or betrayed in a house that belonged to the Joscelyns. So there can’t be any ghosts.”

“You reprove me justly,” he said, feeling his little joke very small indeed in the presence of Lydia’s youthful dignity. “It was a vulgar, slangy sort of suggestion. I see the folly of it now.”

“No folly,” said Lydia, from her pedestal; “you did not know.”

And then they went on together, once more very sedately, as if they had been a sober, middle-aged couple, the corn rustling and nodding towards them, the soft wind sweeping over it, bowing its yellow plumes in soft successions of movement, the whole air full of a happy rustle and sweep of sound, the sound of the atmosphere, the subdued hum of summer happiness common to all the world. He made up his mind that the landscape, all full of young trees and northern colours, and the moment, in which there was no positive bliss indeed, but only a dreary, dusty lodging, and the prospect of being cared for by a ploughman’s wife—were perfect, and that life could not hold anything sweeter. Lydia went on talking of the chance that perhaps Mr. Pilgrim, the executor, would “do something” when he heard of a tenant, until it gradually began to appear to the young man as if she were talking of improving heaven. What could be equal in all the world to a place which was within reach of the White House? “But if your brother were to come home suddenly,” he said, “what would become of me? Should I be turned out?”

“Harry!” cried Lydia, with glistening eyes; and then she said, turning to him (he was behind her for the moment, the path was so narrow), “Harry! Oh, how kind you are! To speak like that is to give one courage; for you really, really think, Mr. Brotherton, don’t you, now you have heard all about him, that he must come home?”

CHAPTER V.
THE DUCHESS.

WHEN it was known that the old house at Birrenshead had been taken by a gentleman for shooting quarters, the astonishment of the neighbourhood was great. The house was known to be in a most dilapidated condition, and the rooms had not been occupied in the memory of man. The village took the most anxious interest in the rash gentleman, and inquired, with much solicitude, “what motive” he could have for burying himself in such a place? Was it for the sake of Lydia Joscelyn? But then he had been much nearer Lydia Joscelyn at the White House, where the family no doubt would gladly have kept him had he wished it; or was it on the other hand to get away from Lydia, who had been devoting herself too unreasonably to him? Both these opinions had their supporters; but as it was impossible to prove either, the question remained a burning question for half of the time that young Brotherton lived at Birrenshead, where he soon became well-known. He was quite a gentleman, there could be no doubt of that. He had a couple of horses and a man, and money did not seem to be wanting with him. The neighbours soon found out all that was to be found, which was not saying much—that he was Sir John Brotherton’s son, and a great friend of Lord Eldred, the second son at the Castle; and that he was actually, on his own showing, second cousin to Mrs. Joscelyn. Had she said it the neighbourhood might have doubted; but he said it himself; and he was constantly at the White House. Scarcely a day elapsed that he was not there on one pretence or another, and sometimes Lord Eldred would go with him, having his dinner there, the gossips said, and sometimes tea, and conducting himself as if the Joscelyns were his equals. This opened a new and exciting question, which was discussed warmly by the different sides, each maintaining its own view. What would the Duchess do? She had excluded the Joscelyns from the list of county gentry when they were first married, asking, with a contempt for blood, which was most unbecoming in the local head of society (and the Joscelyns had blood—it was the one thing that could not be denied to them), “Why should I call upon people who have nothing to recommend them but that their grandfathers were gentlemen?” This leaving out of the family altogether had been very marked; when you consider that the Selbys, who were nobodies, had cards from the Duchess because the old Doctor was their father! Mrs. Joscelyn had not said anything about it, but she had felt the sting all her life. And she was not less interested than the rest of the world in the question—What would the Duchess now do? This problem was not solved for several weeks; but at last, just before the great ball which absorbed the whole county in consideration of what to wear, and how to appear to the best advantage, the village was convulsed by the appearance of the ducal liveries. It was an October day, with frost in the air, so clear that you could see to any distance, from one end of the dale to the other. The Selbys, called to their windows by the roll of wheels and the jingle of the horses’ feet and furniture, and the flood of blue and yellow in the air, rushed to the vicarage to rouse their friends to the seriousness of the crisis. “The Duchess is going to call,” they cried, rushing in open-mouthed. “The Duchess has called,” cried the others, who were all grouped round a telescope which they had brought to bear on the door of the White House. There the carriage was undoubtedly standing, delayed an unreasonable time at the door—which both the families felt, whatever reason they might have, showed bad taste on the part of the Joscelyns. Then the footman, a splendid apparition all plush and powder, was seen to make his way a second time up the narrow path, between the two grass plots, bordered all round with chrysanthemums. The watchers had a moral certainty that Mrs. Joscelyn was not out. Had she denied herself to the Duchess? A thrill of sensation passed through the minds of the observers—of mingled stupefaction and excitement. To say “not at home” was a moral offence upon which people were hard in that primitive community; but to have the courage to say it, was something which overawed them. And to the Duchess! Imagination could scarcely go further.

When Mrs. Joscelyn perceived, with a sudden rush of blood from her heart to her head, that the honour she had been looking for all her life had actually happened to her, she rose up precipitately and fled, throwing a shawl over her head. This was partly fright, and partly resentment, and partly it was a wise impulse. The family parlour and Betty in her white apron to open the door, were not accessories which would impress the Duchess, and Mrs. Joscelyn had not much confidence in the refinement of her own appearance. She was not so bold a sinner, however, as to sit still and instruct her innocent maid to say, “Not at home,” a task to which Betty, knowing it was not true, would not have been equal. So she went out, meeting Betty trembling with excitement, tying on her clean apron as she came. “It’s the Duchess, missis!” Betty said, overwhelmed. “You will say, Not at home,” said Mrs. Joscelyn breathless. “I am going out, you see.” “Going out! Missis! and the Duchess at the door.” Betty thought it was incredible. Mrs. Joscelyn, however, deaf to remonstrance, though herself trembling with excitement, ran out upon the Fell side, and enjoyed the spectacle. She was an Englishwoman, and it is not to be supposed that the sight of the blue and yellow liveries, and the carriage with a Duchess in it, did not touch the highest feelings in her nature; and to have spoken to that Duchess, to have realised the full glory of the event, would have been sweet—but it would have been alarming too, and discretion is the better part of valour. She stood upon the rising ground with her heart beating, and gazed at the wonderful sight, visions rising before her of the ball, and the invitation for Lydia which would be sure to follow, and the ball dress, and all the excitement of so great an occasion. She breathed more freely when the great lady drove away, and she was delivered from the fear of being sent for, and compelled to come back by some dreadful mistake on Betty’s part. But Betty too had risen to the occasion. She had said trembling, but resolute, “Not at home, Sir,” to the fine footman—arguing with herself that it was quite true that Missis wasn’t at home, for hadn’t she seen her, with her own eyes, go out? Betty went out too to ease her Mistress’s mind, when the incident was over, carrying the cards in her apron. She did not like to touch them with her hands, though she had scrubbed those hands crimson only a few minutes before. “T’ gentleman said as Her Grace was sorry,” said Betty, her eyes almost out of her head with staring. “T’ gentleman” was the biggest part of the event to her; she had never in her life seen anything so grand so near. Her ruddy cheeks were crimson, and her liberal bosom palpitated. And Mrs. Joscelyn could not herself restrain a tremor when she took these sacred bits of pasteboard in her hand.

The excitement about the ball, however, was not all pleasurable. The invitation came a few days after, and at first Lydia, who had a great spirit, altogether refused to avail herself of it. She was in the parlour with her mother, arranging bunches of the ruddy leaves and rowan berries which made the country gay, in the big old-fashioned china vases which stood on the mantel-piece, and which were worth their weight in silver, though nobody was aware of it. Lionel Brotherton had come in on his way back from a short day’s shooting. He had brought some game, which lay in a shallow basket on the table, the mingled colours of the plumage harmonizing well with the warm autumnal tints of leaves and fruit. The whole culminated in the girl’s glowing and animated countenance as she stood by the table, twisting her garlands of leaves and throwing them about with a freshness of gesture and energy which only a touch of indignation could have given. She had put a cluster of the red berries into her hair, with a few long serrated leaves, marked with brilliant red upon the green; and thus crowned was like an autumnal nymph, not mature enough for a Ceres, but yet warm with the northern glow of colour and life. “Why should I go?” she was saying. “What is it to me, mother? If the Duchess chooses to fling an invitation at us after all these years, are you and I to seize upon it as if we cared? I don’t care. I don’t want it. I should not like to go—Of course I may be forced,” cried Lydia. “I may have to do it, for all the several reasons which people always bring up; but listen, mother, this is the truth, I should not like to go.”

“My dearest,” said her mother, joining her hands in that instinctive movement of entreaty which was her natural attitude. Nobody could admire Liddy as her mother did, not even the young man who sat a little apart gazing at her, and thinking all kinds of foolish thoughts. Mrs. Joscelyn saw in her the perfection of herself, the accomplished ideal to which she had been striving all her life. She herself would never have had the strength of mind to look so, and speak so—but Liddy had; and even while she remonstrated and entreated, she approved. “My pet, that is just your fancy. Why shouldn’t you like it? You have never been at a ball.”

“That is just the reason,” cried Lydia; “when I do go I want to enjoy it. I want to be as good as anybody there. I want people to think as much of me as anyone, and ask me to dance, and think my dress pretty, and like me altogether. I won’t go anywhere unless I can be sure of that.”

“And so you will, my darling,” Mrs. Joscelyn said. Brotherton did not venture to speak, but he put a great deal into his eyes. Lydia indeed did not look at him, and so could not perceive this, but perhaps she had some notion of it all the same. Her colour increased the least in the world, taking a glow from the red leaves in her hands and the red berries in her hair.

“No, mother, I know how it will be. We shall come in at the end with the Selbys, and the Armstrongs and the Pilgrims, and—oh, a great many more. There will not be any want of companions in distress. We will all keep together at one end of the room, and our hearts will all beat if anybody comes near us. If it is an officer from Carlisle, or if it is Mr. Brotherton, or still more if it should happen to be Lord Eldred. Oh my!” cried Lydia with momentary mimicry, clasping her hands, “We shall look at him as if we could eat him, and almost hold out our hands like the children at school, and cry, me, me! If you think that is nice for nice girls to have to do, mother, I don’t,” said Lydia with a sudden vivid flush. “So I don’t want to go.”

“But that is impossible,” Brotherton cried.

“No, not at all impossible; it is just what happens, when people ask you because they cannot help it; of course they don’t take any trouble about you; and of course the gentlemen prefer to dance with girls they know, and who belong to their own class, instead of seeking out poor little Miss Selbys and Miss Armstrongs, and Miss Jos—No,” said Liddy vehemently, “a Miss Joscelyn has never been in it, and, mother, if you please, never will be. I don’t say,” she added, calming down, “that it is anyone’s fault. I feel quite sure for one that you would ask me to dance, Mr. Brotherton.”

“Do you really—think so? The time has come,” said the young man, hurried and nervous, but with a laugh of excitement, “to set one matter to rights. Mr. Brotherton will certainly not ask you to dance, Miss Joscelyn. I have a right to be Cousin Lionel, and I will be so. I am not to be defrauded of my birthright any longer. You talk of the Duchess, but you are far more haughty than the Duchess. Take the beam out of your own eye, Cousin Lydia, and then you will see more clearly to take the mote out of the Duchess’s. Mrs. Joscelyn, am I not right?”

Mrs. Joscelyn looked at them both with a pleasure that almost went the length of tears. In the sudden union which her glance from one to another made between them, the young man and the young woman blushed—blushed for nothing at all, for sympathy, for fellow-feeling, and a little for pleasure. “Yes, yes, my dear,” Mrs. Joscelyn said, “yes, yes, I think he is right; and your cousin—your cousin would make a difference. And then, my darling, if you do not go, people will never know that you were invited, Liddy; and that means—”

“That we are not county people; and we are not county people. We need not keep up any pretences before—before Cousin Lionel,” said Lydia with a blush and a smile, and a curtsey to the young man, who looked on with a sense of enchantment. “Uncle Henry was one of them; but not we. We are Joscelyns, however,” she cried, tossing her head upwards with a proud movement, “and if blood means anything, that means something better than her Grace.”

“But why do you say if blood means anything, Liddy?” said her mother, “of course it means everything, my love.”

Then Lydia looked straight at the two people before her; both so admiring, the one more foolish than the other—and the meaning changed in her face. She sighed; her pretty head, crowned with the glowing red berries and brilliant leaves, drooped a little. “Because I don’t believe it does,” she said.

Then there was an outcry, “Oh, Liddy, Liddy!” of horror and alarm from her mother, who had borne everything else, poor soul, but who could not bear any attack upon her last stronghold, her pride of family. It had always been a comfort to her in all her troubles, and specially in those social ones which her greater neighbours had made her suffer—that, to everybody who knew, the Joscelyns were far superior even to her Grace, who had been nobody. To hear her favourite child express this scepticism was terrible. Even Brotherton sustained a slight shock of disappointment. He would have preferred on the whole that Lydia should have felt a romantic certainty of the claims of “blood;” but since it was not so, he made a virtue out of her incredulity, and looked at her with a smile and little nod of sympathy. Lydia, however, was wise enough to make no answer to her mother’s exclamation of horror.

“If I went,” she said with great decision, “you would have to go too; I will not go with anybody but you.”

“Me, Liddy?” Mrs. Joscelyn cried in alarm.

“And my father. I will go with you both, or not at all,” Lydia gave out as her final deliverance; and then she went out of the room, carrying the remains of her autumnal wreaths, and paying no attention to the pathos of her mother’s protestations. Mrs. Joscelyn could do nothing but turn to her young kinsman, and appeal to his impartial judgment.

“What should I do among all those fine people? I have not been out in the evening nor worn a low dress (in those days ‘low dresses’ were exacted even from old ladies by the stern fiat of fashion) since that child was born. You must speak to her, you must speak to her, Mr. Brotherton—I mean Lionel. Oh, yes, I want her to go; but me! and Ralph. Ralph has never gone among them, I think he has done himself injustice; but it is too late to change now. You must tell her it would never do.”

“But you would not like her to go with the Selbys or the Pilgrims—people not fit to be in the same room with her. I should not like that,” young Brotherton said. And Mrs. Joscelyn’s pale countenance coloured with pleasure to think that her child should be so determined, and her young cousin so approving. This sudden appreciation of herself was late, but yet it was pleasant, though also embarrassing. And after this there were continual remonstrances and arguments, Liddy holding to her point, her mother fighting desperately against it. As for Ralph Joscelyn, he separated himself at once from the feminine part of his household. “Go to what tomfoolery you like,” he said, with his usual courtesy, “but don’t ask me; I’ve nought to do with such nonsense.” Mrs. Joscelyn was then driven to the end of her forces. She was disturbed too about Lydia’s ball-dress, which Joan would fain have gone to Carlisle for and been “done with,” in her energetic way; but the mother had no confidence in Joan’s taste. And for her part, though Joan had behaved generously it cannot be denied that she felt her exclusion from the splendour which ought to have belonged to her as the eldest Miss Joscelyn, but which her husband’s position excluded her from. The other Selbys even, who went on sufferance as the Doctor’s family, made it more hard for Joan.

“My husband is a deal better a man than Raaf Selby will ever be,” she said with some indignation to Brotherton, who heard the complaints on all sides, “and nobody that knows them would ever hesitate between them. But Heatonshaw is only a little place, and we’ve nothing at all to do with the great folks at the Castle. Of course it is me Liddy ought to go with; and it is a joke to think that Raaf Selby’s family should all be going, and not me. But I will never forgive mother if she sends Liddy with them, and does not go herself to take care of the child. Mother’s a strange woman. She was never happy till the Duchess called, and now she has got her desire she’ll not hear any more of it. I like consistency. Now I don’t care a snap of my fingers for the Duchess; but if she invited me,” said Joan, magnanimously, “I’d go.” Here she paused, but a minute or two after resumed with great gravity. “A woman takes her husband’s rank, whatever that may be. I am not ashamed of my husband because he does not take her Grace’s eye.” And here Joan laughed again, but with an uneasy laughter. She was sore on the subject, and perhaps if she had been entrusted with the buying of the dress the result might have been disastrous. Mrs. Joscelyn would not trust Joan, but in her own timid person hesitated and doubted what to do, when Brotherton, the confidant of all their troubles, came to her aid. He proposed that his mother, who was in town (much the best place for everything of the kind; the place where fashion reigned, and ball-dresses were much more plentiful than blackberries), should get the dress.

“Which will be of no use,” said Lydia, sternly, “without a dress for my mother too.” At this Mrs. Joscelyn was ready to cry, not knowing what else to do. Her hands stole towards each other with the nervous gesture of old, when Brotherton again whispered in her ear a message of hope.

“My mother is coming—leave it to me,” he said. She had almost thrown her arms round his neck in her intense relief and thankfulness.

And this was how it was that Lydia Joscelyn made such a sensation at the ball. Had she gone with the Selbys, all would have happened precisely as she predicted. She would have stood among them, in a white gown bought at Carlisle, at the bottom of the room, surrounded by a little crowd of other obscure young ladies, left out in the cold, tremulously eager to secure partners, and taken notice of by nobody. There she would have stayed, pretending to be amused, till old Mrs. Selby gave the signal, and gathered her little flock around her, tired with standing, sick with waiting, cross, and humiliated and mortified, consoled only by the thought that the ball at the Castle would be a thing to talk of long after people had forgotten to ask, “Did you dance much?” But for Lydia was reserved a more splendid fate. She had a dress which everybody at the White House thought would have been fit for a princess, and she went with Lady Brotherton, with whom she stayed at the Wyburgh Hotel afterwards, and whose presence introduced her into the selectest circle, and the company of all the first people. Lady Althea went so far as to admire her dress, and Lord Eldred danced with her so often that his mother was alarmed, but yet could not do anything but smile upon the stranger whom Lady Brotherton patronised and introduced as “my young cousin.” Lady Brotherton was a fanciful and romantic woman, and she seized at once upon the idea that Lydia was the object of a romantic attachment on the part of Lord Eldred. Perhaps had she known that her own son was in any danger from the same quarter, it might have checked her enthusiasm. But Lionel did not feel bound in honour to give her any information on that point. She was seized with an enthusiastic friendship for Liddy before they had been half an hour together, and as she was a graceful, sentimental woman, with very tender and engaging manners, Lydia was not wanting in her response. Then Sir John, who was much older than his wife, added his contribution to the rising warmth of the relationship by vowing continually that this was the Cousin Lydia of his youth over again. The fact was that he had seen his cousin Lydia only once or twice in her youth, but he was old enough to have forgotten that, and nobody knew it was a mistake. So all things concurred in the growth of this sudden devotion, and before Lydia returned to her mother she was invited to accompany the Brothertons abroad, and had become, so to speak, one of the family.

“I will come and see your mother,” Lady Brotherton said, “and I will take no denial;” while Sir John patted her on the shoulder, and told her with his toothless jaws, that she was “sh’image of” her mother. Lydia came home with her head turned, but faithful, among all these new crotchets of other people’s, to her own.

“You are not to say no, mother dear; but I know you will never do that. You are to put up with the loneliness, and manage without me the best you can; for I am going to find Harry,” Lydia cried. This new piece of excitement obliterated the ball, which was quite an inferior event. Mrs. Joscelyn cried, and clung to her child in a kind of despair, yet hope.

“Oh, my darling, what shall I do without you? and how are you to find him?” she said; then wept and wrung her hands. “And how am I to make sure that your new friends will be kind to you? Oh, yes, they are kind now; but it is different now and when you have nobody else; and what, oh what, if you were unhappy, my pet, when you were away.”

“Well,” said Lydia, who was a young person of much strength of mind, “even in that case there could be nothing desperate about it, for I should come back. They could not lock me up in my room and feed me on bread and water. If I was not happy I should come home.”

“But oh, my pet, think,” cried Mrs. Joscelyn, with a fresh outbreak, “if you should be left like that to travel alone.”

“And why not?” said Liddy. “Nobody would meddle with me if I behaved myself; and I hope I should always behave myself. But they will not be unkind to me. Do you think there is anything unkind about—Cousin Lionel.” She pronounced his name always with a little hesitation, which, to the foolish young man himself, made it very sweet.

“No, no, Liddy; but then he is only a man—only a young man, and admires you. His mother will not be like that. A lady is different; a lady is not carried away.”

“A lady is—much more easily satisfied,” said Liddy. “She took to me in a moment, mother. They said they never saw her take so quickly to anyone; and Sir John says I am like you.”

“Like me! I don’t think he ever saw me.”

“Never mind, never mind, mother; they are not a den of robbers. They cannot do me any harm. And I shall find Harry,” Lydia said.

CHAPTER VI.
THE OPINION OF THE FAMILY.

THE Joscelyns were much excited and disturbed by all this “to do” about Liddy, which the sisters-in-law thought intolerable, and which, as has been already related, moved even Joan to some sensation of displeasure, notwithstanding the gratified sense of family pride which she experienced as a Joscelyn in the recognition of her family, which, though late, was satisfactory. But Mrs. Will and Mrs. Tom had no such feeling. To them the sense of being left out was not less but rather more disagreeable because a little chit like Liddy had been made much of and received as the representative of her race. Neither of these ladies could bear to hear of it, and Will and Tom showed their feelings in indignant ridicule, scorning the thought that a little lass should be put in the foreground, and their own substantial claims as the heirs of the Joscelyn name disregarded. For what is a girl in a family? nothing; a mere accident; perhaps useful in a way as extending the connection, but directly of no sort of benefit at all. When they heard, however, that Lydia was going “abroad” their indignation burst all bounds. Where was the money to come from? The sons and the sons’ wives were as angry as if it came out of their own pockets. Mrs. Will even cried, and enumerated a whole list of things which were wanted to make her house comfortable. “I never have even a trip to the seaside,” she said, “and as for a piano where I’m to get one I can’t tell, and the children all growing up; and there isn’t a sideboard in the house, not like I was used to, and the poorest stock of linen! while your sister is gallivanting all over the world.” Mrs. Tom suggested that nothing but a surreptitious slice out of Uncle Henry’s property—which it was a sin and a shame to keep hanging on because of a runaway, who must be dead years ago or he would have come back on the hands of his family, no doubt about that—could have induced Ralph Joscelyn to consent to such a mad piece of expenditure. “That Pilgrim just plays into their hands,” she said; “your mother’s silly enough for anything, when it’s for Liddy, but your father’d never have done it without something to go upon.” The brothers were so moved by these arguments, and by their own sense of injustice, that they made a joint raid upon the paternal house to see what remonstrance would do. “I’ll tell you what it is, father, it’s time that money was divided,” said Will; “it would come in uncommon handy, I can tell you, in my house, with all my children growing up.” Tom had no children, but he was not less forcible in his representations. “We’re a laughing-stock to all the county,” he said, “hanging on waiting for Harry turning up. If Harry had been going to turn up he’d have done it long ago. There never was a good-for-nothing in a family but he came back.” Now the day of this visit was a day which Joan had chosen to come to the White House to hear “all about it,” and these words were spoken at the family table just after the early dinner, for which an additional chicken had been killed on account of the guests.

“Good for nothing!” said Joan, indignantly, “that’s what our Harry never was. You may say what you like of yourselves, but of him I’ll never stand such lying. He was as honourable a lad as ever stepped. He never asked a penny from one of you, nor from father either—that he got. So far from taking anything of yours with him, he left his own behind him. Poor lad! there’s his very clothes in his drawers. It must have cost him a mint of money to get more to put in their place. I’ve often thought of that. If it’s just to put mother out, which is all you’ll do, you may as well try some other subject than Harry. Mother, don’t you take on. He’s no more dead than I am. He’ll come home some fine day to take up his property—if you don’t let them put you into your grave first.”

Mrs. Joscelyn’s hands had crept together in a nervous clasp. She looked pitifully from one to another. “Boys,” she said, in her soft voice, to the threatening men who looked older and infinitely harder than she, “I hope you’ll have a little patience. If I had the money, oh! how gladly I would give it you! It is hard, too, when you have need of it. I say nothing against that.”

“Need of it! I should think we had need of it,” said Will. “As for giving it if you had it, that’s easy speaking; and there are plenty that promise what they haven’t, and think no more of it when they have. What’s this we hear of Liddy going abroad? I should say that would cost a pretty penny. My wife and me, we can’t take our family so much as for a fortnight to the sea-side.”

“And what business is it of your wife’s and yours where Liddy goes?” said Joan, instantly throwing her shield over her own side. “You’ll not get Liddy’s money, you may be sure of that, to take you to the sea-side.”

“Oh, children!” cried Mrs. Joscelyn, clasping her hands.

“Well, I must say it’s more reasonable that a family of children should have a change, than that a bit of a lass like Liddy should go picking up foreign manners and ruining her character—not that I am speaking for myself——” Tom interposed. But he was interrupted by a cry from Joan, repeating his last words, “ruining her character!” and by an exclamation of pain from her mother. “Well,” cried Tom, “I say again, ruining her character. Is there any decent man about here that would have anything to do with a Frenchified wife?—not to say that a woman’s morals are always undermined in those foreign places. And Liddy’s flyaway enough, already——”

Here Joscelyn commanded silence by striking his fist upon the table with a blow that made the glasses ring. “Hold your dashed tongues,” he said. “What have you got to do with it, you lads? You’ve got what belongs to you, and you can go to Jericho and be blanked to you. If there’s any man has a right to interfere in my house, I’d like just to see his dashed face. Hold your tongues, the whole blanked lot of you. Them that’s in my house will do as I please, and them that has houses of their own had better go where they came from; and, Liddy, don’t you say a word, my lass. I’ll look after you,” he said, laying a large hand upon her shoulder, as he thrust his chair away from the table with an impulse which displaced the table too, and jarred and shook everything upon it. When Joscelyn “spoke up,” there was nobody in his family that ventured to withstand him. The sons rose, too, somewhat abashed, and strode forth after him to view the stables, which was the recognised thing to do after the meal, which thus came to an abrupt conclusion. They shook their heads over father’s weakness, and declared to each other that “they (meaning the women) had got him under their thumb”—though “who would have thought it of father!” “It’s what every man comes to when he begins to break up,” Tom said.

When they were gone Mrs. Joscelyn cried, but the two sisters were indignant. “Now, mother, don’t be a silly,” Joan said. “They are just as worldly and as hard as they always were. But what can you expect when you think of the two women these poor lads married? It is a wonder they are no worse.”

“Oh!” sighed poor Mrs. Joscelyn, “when I think the bonnie boys they were!” for she was a woman upon whom experience had little power, and who never could learn.

As for Lydia it struck her against her will with a strong sense of the ridiculous to hear her middle-aged brothers, in whose favour she had scarcely even a natural prejudice, spoken of as “bonnie boys.” It was all she could do out of respect for her mother not to laugh. And she was more angry than she was amused. “What harm does it do to Will and Tom,” she said, “that I should be going abroad?”

“They are just furious that Liddy has been asked to the Castle,” said Joan. “Oh, I know them down to the bottom of their hearts; but I’ll tell you what, mother, if it’s a question of making a lady of Liddy, and sending her out in a way to do us credit, you mind there’s nothing to be spared upon her, for Phil and me, we’ll do our share.”

This was all Mrs. Will and Mrs. Tom (for the other women of the family scouted the idea that the brothers were anything but puppets in the hands of these ladies), made by their motion. They threw Joan vehemently upon the other side, blew away the little vapour of envy and uncharitableness which made the elder sister grudge for a moment the younger’s elevation, and bound Joan in enthusiastic partizanship to all her little sister’s wishes. “She shall do us credit,” Joan said, “if I don’t have a gown to my back for years to come. She shall want for nothing if I have to give up my party next Christmas. She shall find out who it is that stands by her, and them that think of her in the family.”

“I never had any doubt about that,” said Lydia, throwing her arms round her sister, “and, Joan, I’ll bring you the best of presents, I’ll bring you Harry back.”

At this Joan shook her head and wiped a tear out of the corner of her eye. “It’s a blessing,” she said, “you little thing, that Phil’s just as silly about you as me; but to find Harry, poor Harry, will take a cleverer than you.”

“Joan, do not you say that. I have it borne in upon me here,” said Mrs. Joscelyn, laying her thin hands upon her bosom, “that before I die I will see my boy back.”

“And it is I that will find him,” Liddy cried, throwing back her head with a proud movement of self-confidence; for the moment, being foolish women, they all believed in this inspiration. “And why not,” said sensible Joan, “it may be the Lord that has put it into her head. And all these fine folks, the Duchess and my lady and the rest of them, may just have been instruments.”

This suggestion filled them all with momentary awe. To see such noble means bringing about a triumphant end, and to be able to trace so easily the workings of Providence, is always the highest of pleasures to the simple-minded. To bring Harry back to his own, and comfort the heart of his mother before she died, was this not an object worthy the employment of Duchesses? Meanwhile Tom and Will went home discomfited, and told their wives how father had “shut them up.” “These women have got him under their thumb,” was what they all said.

Then there came another agitating crisis; Sir John and Lady Brotherton offered a visit to their cousin to arrange the details of their journey, and this made such an overturn in the White House as had not been known in the memory of man. To the wonder of everybody, Joscelyn made no objection to it. A shade of complacency even stole over his face as he gave his consent. “My lady—will maybe take a fancy to me, as some one else has ta’en a fancy to thee,” he said, pulling Lydia’s ear with unprecedented playfulness. Certainly the women had got him under their thumb at last. Joan and her husband came over with a great sense of importance to help to prepare for this great ceremonial, he enacting butler and she housekeeper to the admiration of all concerned. Philip Selby knew about wine, nobody could gainsay that; while his wife prepared enough of what were then called “made dishes,” and pastry and cakes, to have lasted a month instead of a day. Then the amiable pair drove home at a great rate, to dress themselves in their best and present themselves solemnly as guests to meet the strangers. Lionel Brotherton was in all these secrets; Joan and he indeed exchanged a smile of intelligence when after working together all day they met and shook hands in the evening; but he kept inviolate the confidence bestowed upon him, and never betrayed even to his mother the tremendous pains that had been taken to prepare for her, and receive her fitly. When he went up to her room after the dinner was over, to bid her good night, Lady Brotherton could not speak enough in praise of their new cousin. “You did well to say it was an idyllic life,” she cried. “You did not say a word too much, Lionel; what freshness, what simplicity, what a breath of the moor; and all so nice, such pretty curtains (Lionel himself had helped to fasten them up that morning), such nice old furniture! I thought pretty Liddy was quite an exceptional moor-blossom, but I quite understand her now. Her mother is a most refined woman. I should like to model those hands of hers; they are full of expression. And that handsome whitehaired father like a tower, quite the ideal representative of a very old impoverished family, little education, and not much to say, but with long descent in every feature!” It was all Lionel could do to keep his countenance.

“I am so glad you like them, mother; I don’t know when I have been so glad; and you can’t think how kind they have been to me.”

“I love them for it,” said Lady Brotherton, “not that I am surprised—for they like you, Lionel, one can see that, and nothing could be more delightful to your mother. Tell me, dear, does poor Lord Eldred come often, or is he forbidden to come? I want to know how far it has gone.”

“How far what has gone?” said Lionel aghast.

“Is it possible you have not noticed? I am sure he made no secret of it, poor fellow; the Duchess saw it well enough. Why, that Lord Eldred is over head and ears, or if there is any stronger expression—deep, deep in the depths of love; and I am mistaken if she does not know as well as I—”

“In love—with—? not Lydia? Lydia!” Lionel cried, as if this were the most astonishing thing in the world.

Lady Brotherton’s back was turned; she did not see his lamentable countenance. She laughed with a tinkling silvery laugh for which she was famous, but which her son at that moment felt to be the harshest and least melodious of sounds. “Who else?” she said; “there is no one but Lydia here capable of being fallen in love with. Not that nice Mrs. Selby, you may be sure, which would not be proper, and is impossible—no, Liddy—I like the name of Liddy. It is quite rural and moorland, like all the rest. Well, don’t you think she knows it too?”

“I shouldn’t say so,” Lionel answered with the greatest gravity. He tried very hard not to be so deadly serious; but he could not smile.

“Well, we shall see, we shall see,” said Lady Brotherton gaily, “of course I shall not interfere. I dare say the Duchess blesses me for taking her out of the way. But if the lover has the courage to follow, nobody need expect me to put obstacles in the course of true love. It shall run smooth for me. Going, Lionel? God bless you, dear; the Fells have agreed with you, you are as brown and strong as you can look, and I must go and see your den to-morrow. Good night, good night, my own boy.”

Lionel went away in a frame of mind very different from that with which he had followed his mother upstairs. He looked into the parlour with a countenance so solemn that the little party assembled there, and congratulating themselves on everything having gone off so well, were entirely chilled. Mrs. Joscelyn, reposing in her chair with her hands clasped, was smiling with relief and pleasure, while Joan described all the pangs with which she had looked forward to the arrival of my Lady. “I thought she would be so stiff and so grand,” said Joan, “Lord, I don’t know what I didn’t think; but she’s as nice a woman as mother or myself, and takes nothing upon her. As long as I live I’ll never be afraid of a fine lady again.” Here Lionel’s solemn voice was heard at the door.

“I have come to say good night,” he said; “no, thank you, I will not sit down. I have a long walk before me; not anything, thank you. My mother is very comfortable, and much obliged to you, Mrs. Joscelyn. I beg I may not trouble anyone to open the door.”

“What is the matter with him with all his ‘thank yous,’ and his ‘not troubling any ones,’” cried Joan when he went away without a smile. It was generally Lydia who let him out, which perhaps Mrs. Joscelyn should not have permitted. But to-night Lydia was checked by his cold looks, and held back shyly, and it was Philip Selby who opened the door. This was a slight matter; but it seemed to prove to Lionel everything his mother had said. He felt rather glad to have left a chill behind him, as he had evidently done; and he was very much tempted to steal to the window and peep in at them, and enjoy the wonder with which no doubt they would ask each other “What is the matter?” It was well he did not do so, for he would have seen the company in the parlour laughing—all but Lydia, who was wondering by herself in a corner, what was the matter?—at a witticism of Joan’s, who had made a solemn face in imitation of poor Lionel the moment his back was turned. Lionel was fortunately not aware of this; but felt that he had produced a sensation, and was not sorry; and so went away gloomily, not to say misanthropically, down into the village and across the bridge and along the river’s side to Birrenshead. On the way he met with old Isaac, who had once more been beguiled into the “Red Lion,” and was now making his way home with much stumbling.

“It was you as kept me, Master,” the old man said, “you know ’twas you as kept me. I’d never have stayed out so long if it hadn’t been for you. If you would mention it to t’missis I would take it kind, for women is very onreasonable.”

“T’auld sinner,” cried a voice in the dark, “to larn t’young gentleman a pack o’ lies. D’ye think I dunuo know where you’ve been just to hear your voice?”

“My good woman,” said Lionel, “don’t be hard upon poor Isaac.”

He was still so terribly serious, and spoke in tones so hollow and tragical, that Jane Oliver was alarmed. She darted forward in the dark and caught hold of his arm.

“Oh! my bonnie young gentleman,” she cried, “tell me! Something’s happened to my silly auld man?”

At this hint Isaac began to moan, and grasped at Lionel’s other arm, leaning heavily upon it.

“It’s nothing, Missis, nothing; that is, not much, nothing to frighten you. T’ young Master’s been that kind, he’s given me his arm to lean upon all along t’ water-side,” Isaac said, with a limp which would have been much too demonstrative had it been addressed to the eye; but in the dark it answered well enough. For once the Missis fell into the trap, and Lionel, dragged round by his pretended patient to the back door, with blessings called down upon his head by the deceived woman, went through the little fiction with the gravest countenance, and without the least inclination even to smile. It was not till he had left Isaac with his foot elevated on a chair, elaborating the story of a supposed sprain, and had groped his way round to the other entrance, and climbed the dilapidated stairs to the musty old sitting-room, in which his solitary lamp was flaring, that he burst into a short laugh, as he threw himself into a chair. If it was Isaac’s little comedy that called forth this sudden outburst, it was only as the climax of a hundred other comedies which were not mirthful. His disappointment, and the confusion of all his thoughts, which his mother’s revelation had brought about, made him, as was natural, misanthropical and bitter. He laughed at the tragical folly and falsehood of everything, himself included; from the Joscelyns making all sorts of efforts to appear better, more refined and comfortable, than they were, by way of pleasing, i.e., deceiving, Lady Brotherton—and Lady Brotherton accepting everything, adding her own fanciful interpretation, not only deceived, but deceiving herself—down to old Isaac, who had so often tried in vain to dupe his wife, and his wife, who was now duped so easily, not by Isaac, but, save the mark! by himself, Lionel, without intention or purpose. “And I, who am the biggest fool of all!” the poor youth said to himself. What had he been doing all these weeks? making a fool’s paradise out of this squalid ruin, and princes and princesses out of the Joscelyns, half farmers, half horse-coupers as they were—all because he had believed in the sweet looks of a girl who the whole time had been aiming these sweet looks over his head at a better match, and a greater personage than himself. What an idiot he had been! the scales seemed to fall from his eyes. He saw everything round him, he thought, in its true colour. What would his mother think if she came and saw the wretched place in which he had been living? She would ask, like the village folk, what could his motive be? His motive, what was it? Even now, mortified and discouraged as he was, he sat upright in his chair with a thrill of alarm, when he imagined a research into his motives. Lady Brotherton might stop the expedition altogether if she found them out. Lydia’s perfidy was terrible, but it would be more terrible still to leave her behind, perhaps to lose sight of her, to miss the opportunity to which he had been looking forward with so much delight. When he came to think of it, his mother had not said Lydia was in love with Lord Eldred, but only that Lord Eldred was in love with Lydia—which was so different. At this Lionel roused himself, and the sight of his portmanteaux packed and ready to be shut up, roused him still more. After all it was to-morrow they were to start, and he, and not Lord Eldred, was to be for the present Lydia’s daily companion. There would be time to do many things before that hero could arrive, even if, as Lady Brotherton suggested, he should join them afterwards. To-morrow, nay, to-day, for it was already past midnight, was all his own, with nobody to interfere.

And next day, with some suppressed tears and fictitious smiles, and a general excitement of the whole neighbourhood, as if the village itself had been going abroad, the party went away. The vicarage people and all the Selbys came out to their doors to see them pass. Raaf Selby on horseback stood like a statue at the end of the bridge, and took off his hat and gave Lydia a look half-tragical and altogether melodramatic. Joan drove her mother in the phaeton steadily, but with a very grave countenance, though now and then bursting into momentary jokes and laughter, to the station to see them off, her husband riding very slowly by their side. Joan laughed by times, but that did not change the seriousness of her face; and Mrs Joscelyn sat with her veil down, a large Spanish veil covered by great spots of black flowers, behind which nobody could see what she was doing. Lydia herself broke down, and cried freely, though her mother could not cry. “I’ll bring home Harry,” the girl cried, with a passionate promise, out of one window of the railway carriage. Lionel was at another, keeping in the background, eager to be off, and shorten the moment of farewells, when his attention was distracted from the pathetic group by the sudden swaying upwards of old Isaac’s shock head. “I thought you’d like to know, Sir,” old Isaac said, “as my missis and me’s the best of friends. And it’s all owing to you, as had the judgment never to say a word. Good-bye and good luck to you, Master; don’t forget old Isaac Oliver as will do you a good turn and welcome whenever he has the chance. Lord! but we took t’ Missis in, that time,” Isaac said, with a grin that reached from ear to ear. And that was the last the travellers saw of the village folk.

CHAPTER VII.
LYDIA’S TRAVELS.

THE quiet that fell over the White House, not to speak of other houses, when Liddy was thus carried off into the wider world, was something which might be felt, like the darkness in the vision. Mrs. Joscelyn subsided into a kind of half-life. She had been living in her child, and when her child was withdrawn, her existence ebbed away from her. She began to wring her hands again, especially when in the wild winter weather the posts were delayed. All that could be done for her was done by the Selbys, who humoured her and petted her, everybody said, like a child. Joan drove over in her phaeton as often sometimes as thrice in a week, and Philip, who was “an understanding man” his wife allowed, did what was still better. He subscribed for her to the circulating library, and kept the poor lady supplied, in defiance of all prejudices, even those of his wife, with a boundless supply of novels. Joan was somewhat indignant and much scandalised by this, asking him if he thought mother was a baby, and if it was his opinion that an old person should waste her time over such nonsense? “If it was a good book indeed,” Joan said. But Philip verified his title to be called “understanding.” He helped her through the dull days as nobody else could. She read and read till she got a little confused among the heroes and heroines, all of whom she wove together by an imaginary thread of connection with Liddy, comparing their fictitious graces, their adventures, their history with those of her child, and following her imaginary Liddy through many a chapter. Lydia’s letters when they came were like another warmer, fuller romance, the most enticing of all.

And then Ralph Joscelyn himself suddenly developed a new character. He was miserable when his daughter was fairly gone, though he had never betrayed any unwillingness to let her go. He read every word of her long letters with a patience which had never been equalled in his life. He gave up the dashes and blanks of which his conversation was once full, and would come in the cold afternoons and sit with his wife, often fatiguing her greatly, and keeping her back from the end of an exciting story, but always meaning the best, and filling her soul with gratitude, even when she felt most bored. And by and bye he would put on his spectacles, and surreptitiously turn over a novel too, when the day was wet, or on a long evening. Thus the sight might be seen of these two in their old parlour, one at each side of the fire, rather dull but friendly, like people who had grown old together, and in whom a moderate modest affection had outlived all quarrels and years. He was a little shamefaced when he was found thus in his wife’s company, but by degrees that wore off too.

Meanwhile, Lydia went far afield, leaving dulness and darkness and cloud behind her; finding winter turned into summer, and her life into sunshine. It would be impossible to use words too strong to express the change that had come upon her. From the north country of England to the south of France was not a more complete difference than from the grey and limited life of the yeoman household to the brightness and variety and grace of existence among people accustomed all their lives to wealth and refinement and luxury. The way in which they travelled, the attendants always round them, the ease with which they took all their gratifications, surprised by nothing that was pleasant, taking luxuries, which were princely to Liddy, as a matter of course, had an extraordinary effect upon her—the effect of a forced and miraculous education, in which every half hour told like a year. For a short time she was much subdued, almost stupefied, indeed, by the revolution in everything round her, and was so very quiet that Lady Brotherton almost came the length, notwithstanding her animated countenance, and the favourable first impression she had made, of thinking her dull. In fact, she was only in a state of intense receptiveness, taking in everything, opening her mind and spirits to all the new influences, which confused and dazzled her. But after thus lying dormant for a time, Lydia suddenly awoke into new life, and bloomed like a flower. She awoke to a great many things which were completely new and strange; to beauty and wealth, to art, which was entirely unknown, and a revelation to her; and to Nature of a lavish and splendid kind, almost as entirely unknown.

There were other revelations, too, upon which, at this moment, it is unnecessary to dwell. It was more than enough that little Lydia, out of what was not much more than a northern farmer’s house, should have found herself in society, in that wandering society of the English abroad where the finest specimens are to be found afloat among the coarsest, and in which all the elements of life are represented; hearing names familiarly pronounced every day which she had hitherto read with reverence in books, talking to personages whose distant doings she had but heard of with awe and wonder, and living in palaces, which she heard found fault with as poverty-stricken and uncomfortable, she who had known nothing better than the drawing-room at Heatonshaw. The party went from France to Italy; to Florence and Rome, and still further south, Naples and all its dependencies. So dazzled and transported was she with all the new things she saw and heard that for the first month or two Lydia forgot all about her quest. When she bethought herself of it, a question arose which was far more troublesome here than it had been at home. What was she to do? To examine anxiously every new face she saw, to look out in the streets and in every company she entered for somebody like Harry, seemed a far less hopeful enterprise in Italy than it had been in England. She did not remember Harry’s face, which was disabling to begin with, and then why should he be in Italy? she asked herself. Poor people (unless they were artists) did not seem to come to Italy, but only people with plenty of money and leisure, who came to enjoy themselves. She was so bewildered by this altogether new idea that she did not know what to do, nor did Lionel, “Cousin Lionel,” to whom she began to refer everything (as indeed his mother did), suggest anything that could help her. They looked over all the visitors’ books together, and lists of the English inhabitants in every new place they came to, with their young heads together, and much secret enjoyment of the business; but neither did this stand her in much stead. In Rome, where they spent Christmas, they were joined, as Lady Brotherton’s prophetic soul had divined, by Lord Eldred; but when they left he did not follow, and Liddy’s course, which was not that of true love but wandering fancy, required no trouble to keep it smooth. But, by others besides Lord Eldred, Lydia was “very much admired,” as people say. She might have got “a very good match” out of her wanderings; but walked through all these possibilities unwitting, not having even her little head turned, which Lady Brotherton expected. The elder lady, however, was delighted with the little sensation she made. She liked the little flutter of moths about this gentle taper. She liked to have half-a-dozen young men standing ready to do every necessary civility, to procure everything that was wanted. Lydia saved her a great deal, she said, in commissionaires; and old Sir John laughed his chuckling old laugh, and said she was just like her mother; his Cousin Lydia had always a train after her. Liddy wondered sometimes whether it was a former Cousin Lydia, a century old or so, whom the old man meant. But they were very kind to her. They became fond of her as the time went on. She lived an enchanted life among them, with “Cousin Lionel” always at her side, seeing everything, doing everything, along with her; and she could not have believed that it would prove so easy to forget Harry and all about him. Sometimes she awoke to this thought with such a sense of guilt as depressed her for days; but in the meantime life was flowing on in content, brightness, and variety, full of a hundred occupations. There was not a moment vacant. Sometimes it would glance across her that the day must come when she must leave it all and return to the White House. Alas, poor mother! vegetating there, keeping herself alive by means of her novels, and chiefly the unfinished romance of Lydia, most delightful of all. What would she have felt had she known the cold chill which came over Lydia as she realised that the day must come when she would be once more at home; and how wretched, how angry Lydia was with herself, how she despised her own frivolous being when she felt this chill invading her! Generally however she put the thought away, and was content to live, and no more. To live, how sweet it was! “Good was it in that time to be alive, and to be young was very heaven.” At last Lydia came, as the time of return approached, to throw away every consideration, and exist only in the moment, with a kind of desperation of happiness. “I shall never have it over again,” she said to herself, and shut her eyes and went on, forgetting home and forgetting Harry, refusing to think of anything but the sweet hours that were going over her; “I shall have had my day.”

Thus time came to have a prodigious sweep and fling as the long delicious holiday approached its end. The hours and days rushed on like the waters of a river hurrying to the falls, every minute increasing the velocity; already the skies were getting bright (as if they had ever been anything but bright!) with spring; the flowers were bursting forth everywhere; the warmth becoming excessive; the English tourists beginning to return home in clouds. And the Brothertons spoke quite calmly of going back to England. To them it meant a natural succession, no more; they would return home to other delights. When autumn came back they would set out again, and go over the same enchanted lands; but for Lydia all would be over. She tried to enter into their plans, however, quite steadily, concealing the vertigo that seized her, and her wild sense of the hurrying rush of those last days. When it was suggested that they should rest a few days at Pisa, Sir John having a cold, and from thence go on to Leghorn, and take the steamer, Lydia felt like a criminal who has got a reprieve; but oh, how guilty, how more than ever deserving of any sentence that could be passed upon her!

By this time there had come a strange uneasiness into her intercourse with “Cousin Lionel.” Liddy had always been more reserved with him than with anyone else, she could not tell why. Since the first frankness of the days when she went with him to Birrenshead there had been a great seriousness in all their relations. This was partly his doing, and partly hers. Lord Eldred’s appearance had checked him when he had been getting rid of the impression which his mother’s opinion on the subject of Lord Eldred had produced on him. And Lydia’s seriousness had subdued the young man. She had consulted him indeed, referred to him constantly, took his advice, kept up an invariable tacit appeal to him in all her concerns, which she was scarcely herself aware of, but which went to the very bottom of his heart; but she was always serious. Her gayer flights were with the moths, as Lady Brotherton called them, the commissionaires, the young men who fluttered about the two ladies, and whom Lydia, caring nothing about them, treated with every kind of gay malice, and a hundred caprices; but she was never capricious with cousin Lionel. They treated each other with a sort of stately dignity, reserved on one side, reverential on the other, to the amusement, but great gratification of Lady Brotherton.

“Thank heaven there is no fear of these two falling in love with each other,” she said, “which is an embarrassment one is scarcely ever safe from.” As for Sir John, he chuckled and declared that his son was an old woman. “Talk’sh like two ambassadorsh,” said the old man. Never was anything more satisfactory; for to have a course of true love so near to her, notwithstanding her sentimental sympathy with the thing in the abstract, would not have suited Lady Brotherton at all. But on the day of Sir John’s cold at Pisa, something occurred which, if she had not been so busy administering gruel, she might not have found so satisfactory. The two young people being thus left alone went out together, and walked very soberly, as was their wont, about the Cathedral and the Baptistery, gazing at everything as it was their duty to do. They stood and looked up at the delicate fretted galleries of the leaning tower, and the blue sky above which filled up every opening. They had been very silent, and silence is dangerous. At last Lionel said hastily:

“I don’t know why this should make me think of the old Joscelyn tower you showed me; there is not much likeness certainly between this and a Border tower.”

“The sky was just as blue,” said Lydia, “in all the crevices; though they say that in England we never see the sky.”

“You remember it too?”

“Yes,” she said with a faint little tremor in her voice.

“And soon you will be there again,” he said (as if it were not brutal to remind her of it!), “but I—— where shall I be?” He threw so much pathos into his tone that Lydia, feeling herself on the brink of darkness and desolation, could not quite restrain a little outburst of impatience. He to talk like that, who would have nothing to give up, whose life would always be as beautiful as it was now!

“Where should you be—but where you please!” she said, with a sharp tone of irritation in her voice.

“Where I please?——do you think?—but I must not ask you that,” Lionel said, drawing a long breath. And then he added as if he were breathless and hurried, though in reality there was nothing to hurry him, “Lydia—I want to speak to you before—before——”

“I don’t know what you mean; you can talk to me whenever you please,” cried Lydia, with the daring of anger. She was angry with him, she could scarcely tell why.

He was silent for a minute, looking at her with a curious expression which she did not understand. What did it mean? No doubt Lionel thought that Lydia knew exactly all that was overflowing in him; the eagerness in his eyes, the hesitation in his mind. He thought she looked him through and through, and she thought he looked her through and through. The young man felt as if it could scarcely be necessary for him to say what was in his heart; she must have seen it in every look for months; and she, on her side, felt that her secret, which he was so likely to have divined, must be kept from him at all hazards. Thus they stood for a moment as in a duel, the man sealing his lips by force, considering, with a generosity that cost him much, that to speak now would make the position intolerable for her, and that any formal declaration of his sentiments (which she must know so well before he uttered them!) must be reserved for the very end of the family intercourse in which they had been living; while the woman, who had been far too much interested on her own account ever to discover his meaning fully, doubted still, and guarding herself against a mistake of vanity, had to guard her own secret, which she would not have him divine. They looked at each other thus for a breathless moment; then he spoke.

“I can talk to you whenever I please? but not now; before—if ever—we part.”

What did that mean? “Before—if ever.” Her heart beat so loudly that she seemed unable to do anything but keep it down, and yet she asked herself wistfully what was the meaning of it. She was tantalized and aggravated beyond words. “That will soon be,” she said with a little mocking laugh, and turning, walked away towards the river. He followed her quite silent and cast down, for he thought this laugh meant the very worst. And when they got back to the inn Lydia disappeared, and save in his mother’s presence saw him no more that day. Lady Brotherton saw no difference for her part. She tried to throw them together benevolently. “You must try and make the best of it,” she said. “I must go back to your father, Lionel. Take Lydia somewhere, show her the town. You are cousins, you need not stand upon ceremony, you don’t want a chaperon.”

“I am so sorry, Lady Brotherton,” said Liddy with an innocent air, “but I must go and write letters. We have been moving about so much lately. I have not written half so often as usual to my mother. I thought I’d take this afternoon for it.”

“That is a pity,” said Lady Brotherton, “I am sure she will excuse you, my dear; you will be with her so soon! and Lionel will be quite lonely; you might give him this afternoon. Your mother will have you in a week, you know.”

Poor wicked Liddy! what a pang it gave her! and a still greater pang to think that it should be a pang. She looked at Lady Brotherton with sorrowful, half reproachful eyes, into which, much against her will, the tears came—but fortunately kept suspended there, making her eyes big and liquid, not falling. “I know,” she said, trying hard to suppress a sigh; “but I must write all the same.”

“Don’t think of me,” said Lionel. “I shall play a game at billiards—or something.” Lady Brotherton paused to launch a mot at the absurdity of coming to Italy to play billiards before she went to Sir John, and in that interval Lydia disappeared, and except at dinner, when his mother was present, the two did not meet again that day.

Sir John was a little better next morning, and declared himself able to go the little way there was to Leghorn, where he would rest another night before taking the steamer. “And there’sh old Bonamy,” he said, “old friend’sh, never forshake old friend’sh. Bonamy, Vicesh-Conshull, famous old fellow.” He was delighted at the idea, though Lady Brotherton shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, yes, he is very nice,” she said, “not old, quite a handsome man; but all these Consular people, they are—you know what they are—However Mr. Bonamy is quite superior. Another night in Italy, Liddy, though it is only a mercantile place and not interesting. Let us hope there will be a moon.”

But Lydia did not wish for a moon. She had got into a state of feverish indifference. It was so nearly over now, that she wished it over altogether. What was the good of a few more hours? She would have run away, had she been able, to get out of it all, to forget Italy if that were possible, and all these five months of happiness. She felt angry with Sir John and his friend, and the place they were going to, and everything about it. A moon? what did she want with a moon? she would have liked to pluck it out of that blue, blue intolerable sky that never changed. It was all Liddy could do to keep herself from making a cross reply.

They got to Leghorn early that Sir John might not be exposed to the heat of the day; and the aspect of that place did not tend to soften Lydia’s feelings; a town with shipping and docks and counting-houses; she declared to herself that it was like any town in England, not like Italy at all. Sir John, who was fond of novelty, had his card sent at once to the Vice-Consul, with a request that Mr. Bonamy would go and see an old friend who was not well enough to visit him; and the old man grew quite brisk on the strength of something new, and sat up in a chair and declared himself quite well. He looked so comfortable that Lady Brotherton was very sorry that she had settled to stay another evening. “When we have quite made up our minds to it, it seems a pity,” she said, “to lose a day.” How tranquilly she spoke! while the two young people listening to her, and too languid or too nervous to take any part in the discussion, felt a secret fury burn within them. “Lose a day!” Neither of them knew whether it was a loss or a gain, an incalculable treasure of possibilities, or a miserable hour the more of suspense and unhappiness. Perhaps they were both most disposed to look upon it in the latter light; and yet they were both angry with Lady Brotherton for talking of losing a day. There is no consistency in youth, nor was there any reason for the nervous excitement which possessed them both. They sat down to luncheon together, both of them devouring their hearts, and quite indisposed for other fare.

“Mr. Bonamy knows our English ways. I should not be surprised,” said Lady Brotherton, “if he came to lunch.”

“Yes, yes, knowshur English ways, English himself,” said Sir John, “knowsh what’sh what. Shure to come in to lunch.”

And then they sat down at table. Lady Brotherton ate her bit of chicken with all that unearthly, immeasurable calm which distinguishes elder people, taking everything quite coolly, though with a flaming volcano on each side of her; would she eat her chicken all the same, they wondered, if they too were to explode and be carried off into the elements? Notwithstanding their mutual opposition, they could not help giving each other a glance of sympathy as they watched her, wondering how she could do it. Lionel felt that he never could again believe in those sensations which his mother had often described to him, which affected her when he was in any trouble. Sympathy! She could not take things so quietly if she was a woman of any sympathy at all.

The meal was half over. Lydia had scattered salad over her plate to look as if she had eaten what was set before her, and Lionel, on his side, had practised some other artifice. Thank heaven the moment was almost over when they must sit there together exposed to observation. When the door opened, Lionel rose to his feet to receive his father’s old friend. But what did Lydia care for Sir John’s old friend? it was an excuse to push her chair away from the table. It was Sir John’s English servant who introduced the stranger; an Italian might have made a mistake about the name, but about this there was no mistake. Thomas came in before the visitor with all the imperturbability of a British flunkey.

“Mr. Isaac Oliver,” he said.

Then Lydia too rose to her feet wondering, with a little cry of surprise. She did not know what she thought, whether it was a messenger from home with evil tidings, or merely a fantastic coincidence. Lionel was greatly astonished too. He made a step forward to meet the new-comer—and there was something in the aspect of the new-comer which puzzled him still more, he could not tell why. Where had he seen him before? He was certain he had seen him before.

“Mr.—Isaac—Oliver?” he said.

He perceived, without being aware of it till after, that at his surprised tone the stranger turned a suspicious look upon him, and glanced round upon the party with the manner of a man who was not entirely at his ease.

“Yes, that is what I am called,” he said.

CHAPTER VIII.
ISAAC OLIVER.

AND after all, what is there in a name? That was not an original observation in Romeo’s case, much less in that of an English resident in Italy far on in the nineteenth century. The person who thus presented himself in Sir John Brotherton’s rooms was tall and strong, and fair, with the amplitude of chest and breadth of back which show a man to have attained the very fullness of manhood, or perhaps a little more. His hair was light brown and curly, with life and vigour in every crisp twist of it, and in the short beard then unusual with Englishmen, and considered “foreign” by the inexperienced. Except this beard, and something in his dress which betrayed a continental tailor, he was altogether English in his appearance, and in his voice there was something that betrayed the North-country, or so at least two of the company, startled by his name, supposed. Lydia who felt ashamed of herself for her little cry of wonder, sat down in a corner behind backs, and felt the better for the curious stir of surprise and expectation which seemed to blow on her like a breath of fresh air: while Lionel bestirred himself to welcome the stranger, who explained that he came on the part of Mr. Bonamy, then occupied in public affairs, who hoped to pay his respects to Sir John later. “I ought to introduce myself as his son-in-law,” Mr. Oliver said.

“Oh, you are Rita’s husband,” said Lady Brotherton, “little Rita! forgive me, I used to know her when she was a child. I have not realised the idea of Rita married.”

“Then you must prepare yourself for a shock,” he said pleasantly. “For Rita has been married more than eight years.”

“And there are children—of course?”

“Four,” he said, with a smile of affectionate pride, “but my wife still looks like a little girl. You will not find so much difference in her appearance as there ought to be. I think Mr. Bonamy prefers to ignore the babies—and it’s not difficult to do so when you look at her. My father-in-law hoped you would come and dine with us to-night.”

“Sir John is—rather an invalid——”

“Not a bit—not a bit!” cried the old man, speaking for himself. “Yesh, yesh, letsh dine with Bonamy. Bonamy knowsh what’sh what.”

“And we are a large party,” said Lady Brotherton deprecating.

Here Lydia came behind her chair. “You must not think of me, dear Lady Brotherton.” “I have—my letters to write.”

“Still letters to write, Liddy? My dear, you must have set up a most alarming correspondence. My young friend, Miss Joscelyn, Mr. Oliver.”

The stranger made a slight movement in his chair, with a hurried breath, and a sudden startled widening of his eyes. It was a thing which he had often said to himself might happen any day, but years of serenity had almost driven it from his remembrance. As it was, the start was but momentary, and perhaps among men might have passed unnoticed. But Lady Brotherton caught it with her keen observation; and Lydia, herself, so excited and curious, saw it with additional excitement, but without any surprise.

“I hope,” he said with a hesitation which did not sound unfriendly. “I hope we may see—Miss Joscelyn, too.”