THE
GREATEST HEIRESS IN ENGLAND.

A NOVEL.
By MRS. OLIPHANT.
NEW YORK:
GEORGE MUNRO, PUBLISHER,
17 to 27 Vandewater Street.

MRS. OLIPHANT’S WORKS

CONTAINED IN THE SEASIDE LIBRARY (POCKET EDITION):

THE GREATEST HEIRESS IN ENGLAND.

CHAPTER I.
NO. 6 IN THE TERRACE.

A country town, quiet, simple, and dull, chiefly of old construction, but with a few new streets and scattered villas of modern flimsiness, a river flowing through it, dulled and stilled with the frost; trees visible in every direction, blocking up the horizon and making a background, though only with a confused anatomy of bare branches, to the red houses; not many people about the streets, and these cold, subdued, only brightening a little with the idea that if the frost “held” there might be skating to-morrow. On one side the High Street trended down a slight slope toward the river, on the other ran vaguely away into a delta of small streets, which, in their turn, led to the common, on the edge of which lay the new district of Farafield. All towns it is said have a tendency to stray and expand themselves toward the west, and this is what had happened here. The little new streets, roads, crescents, and places all strayed toward the setting sun. The best and biggest of these, and at the same time the furthest off of all, was the Terrace, a somewhat gloomy row of houses, facing toward the common, and commanding across the strip of garden which kept them in dignified seclusion from the road a full view of the broken expanse of gorse and heather over which the sunsets played, affording to these monotonous windows a daily spectacle far more splendid than any official pomp. There were but twelve of these houses, ambitiously built to look like one great “Elizabethan mansion.” Except one or two large old-fashioned substantial houses in the market-place, these were the largest and most pretentious dwellings in the town; the proud occupants considered the pile as a very fine specimen of modern domestic architecture, and its gentility was undoubted. It was the landlord’s desire that nobody who worked for his or her living should enter these sacred precincts. It is difficult to keep so noble a resolution in a country where so many occupations which are not conspicuous to the common eye live and grow; but still it was an exalted aim.

In this town there was a street, and in this street there was a house, and in this house there was a room. After this fairy-tale fashion we may be permitted to begin this history. The house, which was called No. 6 in the Terrace, was in no way remarkable externally among its neighbors; but within the constitution of the family was peculiar. The nominal master of the house was a retired clerk of the highest respectability, with his equally respectable wife. But it was well known that this excellent couple existed (in the Terrace) merely as ministers to the comfort of an old man who inhabited the better part of the house, and whose convenience was paramount over all its other arrangements. There was a link of relationship, it was understood, between the Fords and old Mr. Trevor, and though there was no great disparity of social condition between them, yet there was the great practical difference that old Trevor was very rich, and the Fords had no more than sufficient for their homely wants—wants much more humble than those of the ordinary residents in the Terrace, who were the élite of the town. This gave a tone of respect to their intercourse on one side, and a kind of superiority on the other. The Fords were of the opinion that old Mr. Trevor had greatly the best of the bargain. He had none of the troubles of a house upon his shoulders, and he had all its advantages. The domestic arrangements which cost Mrs. Ford so much thought cost him nothing but money; he had no care, no annoyance about anything, neither taxes to pay nor servants to look after, and everything went on like clock-work; his tastes were considered in every way, and all things were made subservient to him. When coals or meat rose in value, or when one of the three servants (each more troublesome than the other, as it is the nature of maids to be) was disagreeable, what did it matter to old Mr. Trevor? And when that question arose about the borough rate, what had he to say to it? Nothing, absolutely nothing! all this daily burden was on the shoulders of Richard Ford and Susan his wife; whereas Mr. Trevor had nothing to do but to put his hand into his pocket, to some people the easiest exercise. He had the best of everything, the chief rooms, and the most unwearied attendance; and not only for him but for his two children, who were a still more anxious charge, as Mrs. Ford expressed it, was every good thing provided. Sometimes the excellent couple grumbled, and sometimes felt it hard that, being relations, there should be so much difference; but, on the whole, both parties were aware that their own comforts profited by the conjunction, and the household machinery worked smoothly, with as few jars and as much harmony as is possible to man.

At the time this history begins, Mr. Trevor was seated in the drawing-room, the best room in the house. The Fords occupied the front parlor below, where the furniture was moderate and homely; but all the skill of the upholsterer had been displayed above. The room had two long windows looking out over the common, not at this moment a very cheerful prospect. There was nothing outside but mist and dampness, made more dismal by incipient frost, and full of the sentiment of cold, a chill that went to your heart. The prospect inside was not much adapted to warm or cheer in such circumstances. The windows were cut down to the floor, as is usual in suburban houses, and though the draught had been shut out as much as possible by list and stamped leather, and by the large rugs of silky white fur which lay in front of each window, yet there were still little impertinent whiffs of air blowing about. And the moral effect was still more chilly. It was not an artistic room, according to the fashion of the present day, or one indeed in which any taste to speak of had been shown. The walls were white with gilded ornaments, the curtains were blue, the carpet showed large bouquets of flowers upon a light ground. There were large prints, very large, and not very interesting, royal marriages and christenings, hanging, one in the center of each wall. Thus it will be seen there was nothing to distinguish it from a hundred other unremarkable and unattractive apartments of the ordinary British kind. A large folding screen was disposed round the door to keep out the draught, and the folding-doors which led into Mr. Trevor’s bedroom behind were veiled with curtains of the same blue as those of the windows. The old man was seated by a large fire in a comfortable easy-chair, with a writing-table within reach of his hand. Mr. Trevor was not a man of imposing presence; he was little and very thin, wrapped in a dark-colored dressing-gown, with a high collar in which he seemed pilloried, and a brown wig which imparted a very aged juvenility to his small and wrinkled face. Gray hairs harmonize and soften wrinkles; but the smooth chin and bright brown locks of this little old man gave him a somewhat elfish appearance, something like that of an elderly bird. He sat with a pen in his hand making notes upon a large document opened out upon the writing-table, and his action and a little unconscious chirp to which he gave vent now and then increased his resemblance to an alert sparrow. And indeed, it might have been a claw which Mr. Trevor was holding up with a quill in it, and his little air of triumphant success and self-content, his head held on one side, and the dab he made from time to time upon his paper, gave him very much the air of a sparrow. He had laid down his “Times,” which hung in a much crumpled condition, like a table-cover, over a small round table on his other hand, in order to make this sudden note, whatever it might be, and as he made it he chuckled. The paper on which he wrote was large blue paper, like that employed by lawyers, and had an air of formality and importance. It was smoothed out over a big blotting-book, not long enough quite to contain it, and had a dog’s-ear at the lower corner, which proved a frequent recurrence on the part of the writer to this favorite manuscript. When he had written all that occurred to him, Mr. Trevor put down his pen and resumed the “Times;” but the interest of the previous occupation carried the day even over that invaluable newspaper, which is as good as a trade to idle persons. He had not gone down a column before he paused, rested his paper on his knee, and chuckled again. Then he leaned over the writing-table and read the note he had made, which was tolerably long; then, with his “Times” in his hand, rose and went to the door, losing himself behind the screen. There he stood for a moment, wrapping his dressing-gown around his thin legs with a shiver, and called for “Ford! Ford!” Presently a reply came, muffled by the distance, from the room below. “I’ve put in another clause,” the old man called over the stair.

Ford below opened the door of his parlor to listen.

“Bless me! have you indeed, Mr. Trevor?” he replied, with less enthusiasm.

“Come up, come up, and you shall hear it,” said the other, fidgeting with excitement. Then he returned to his easy-chair, laughing to himself under his breath. He bent over the document and read it again. “They’ll keep her straight, they’ll keep her straight among them,” he said to himself. “She’ll be clever if she goes wrong after all this,” and then he sat down again, chuckling and tucking the “Times” like a napkin over his knees.

All this time he had not been alone; but his companion was not one who claimed much notice. There was spread before the fire a large milky-white rug, like those that stopped the draught from the windows; and upon this, half-buried in the fur, lay a small boy in knickerbockers absorbed in a book. The child was between seven and eight; he was dressed in a blue velveteen suit, somewhat shabby. He was small even for his small age. His face was a little pale face, with fair and rather lanky locks. Sometimes he would lie on his back with his book supported upon his chest—sometimes the other way, with the book on the rug, and his head a little raised, leaning on his hands. This was his attitude at present; he took no notice of his father, nor his father of him; he was a kind of postscript to old Mr. Trevor’s life; no one had expected him, no one had wanted him; when he chose to come into the world it was at his own risk, so to speak. He had been permitted to live, and had been called John—a good, safe, serviceable name, but no special encouragement of any other kind had been given to him, to pursue the thankless path of existence. Nevertheless, little Jock had done so in a dogged sort of way. He had been delicate, but he had always gone on all the same. Lately he had found the best of all allies and defenders in his sister, but no one else took much notice of him, nor he of them; and his father and he paid no attention to each other. Mr. Trevor took care not to stumble over him, being thoroughly accustomed to his presence; and as for little Jock, he never stirred. He was on the rug in the body, but in soul he was in the forest of Ardennes, or tilting on the Spanish roads with Don Quixote. It was wonderful, some people thought, that such a baby should read at all, or reading, that he should have any books above the level of those that are written in three syllables. But the child had no baby-books, and therefore he took what he could get. Are not the baby-books a snare and delusion, keeping children out of their inheritance? How can they understand Shakespeare, you will say? and I suppose Jock did not understand; yet that great person pervaded the very air about this little person, so that it glowed and shone. Only his shoulders, raised a little way out of the white silky fluff of the rug, betrayed the immovable creature, and his book was almost lost altogether in it. There he lay, thinking nothing of how his life was to run, or of the influences which might be developing round him. There was not a piece of furniture in the room which counted for less with Mr. Trevor than little Jock.

Ford was a long time coming; he had some business of his own on hand, which though not half so important, was, on the whole, more interesting to him than Mr. Trevor’s business; and then he had a little argumentation with Mrs. Ford before he could get away.

“What is it now?” Mrs. Ford said fretfully, “what does he make such a fuss about? Sure there’s nothing so very wonderful in making a will. I’d say, ‘I leave all I have to my two children,’ and there would be an end of it. He makes as much of it as if it was a book that he was writing. Many a book has been written with less fuss.”

“My dear,” said Ford, “there are many people who can write books and can not make a will; indeed the most of them have no need to, if all we hear is true. And you don’t give a thought to the interests— I may say the colossal interests—that are involved.”

“Pooh!” said Mrs. Ford, “I think of our own interests if you please, which are all I care for. Is he going to leave us anything? that is what I want to know.”

“I am sorry you are so mercenary, my dear.”

“I am not mercenary, Mr. Ford; but I like to see an inch before me, and know what is to become of me. He’s failing fast, any one can see that; and if we’re left with the lease of a big house on our hands—” This was the danger that afflicted Mrs. Ford at all moments, and robbed her of her peace.

“Stuff!” Ford said. He knew a great deal about the important literary composition which the old gentleman was concocting; but “he was not at liberty” to mention what he knew. Sometimes it made him laugh secretly within himself to think how differently she would talk if she too knew. But then that is the case in most matters. He went upstairs at last deliberately, counting (as it seemed) every step, while Mr. Trevor sat impatient in his great chair, full of the enthusiasm of his own work, and thinking every minute an hour till he could show his friend, who was entirely in his confidence, who almost seemed like his collaborateur, the last stroke he had made. It was the magnum opus of Mr. Trevor’s life, the work by which he hoped to be remembered, to attain that immortality in the recollection of other men which all men desire. For a long time he had been working at it, a little bit at a time as it occurred to him. He was not like the thriftless literary persons to whom Ford compared him, who write whether they have anything to say or not, whether the fountain is welling forth freely or has to be pumped up drop by drop. Mr. Trevor composed his great work under the most favorable conditions. He had it by him constantly, night and day, and when something occurred to him, if it were in the middle of the night, he would get up and wrap his dressing-gown round his shrunken person and put it down. He did not forget it either sleeping or waking. It was a resource for his imagination, an occupation for his life. Also it was likely to prove a considerable source of occupation to others after his death, if nobody stepped in to nick it into shape.

When he heard Ford’s step on the stairs he began to chuckle again, already enjoying the surprise and admiration which he felt his last new idea must call forth. Ford was a very good literary confidant. He would find fault with a trifle now and then, which made his general approbation all the more valuable, as showing that there was discrimination in it. Mr. Trevor put away the “Times” from his knees, and drew the blotting-book with its precious contents a little nearer. He waited with as much impatience as a lover would show for the appearance of his love. And he had time to take off his spectacles, clean them carefully, rubbing them with his handkerchief, and put them on again with great deliberation before Ford, after very carefully and audibly closing the door behind him, appeared at last on the inner side of the screen which kept out the draught, that draught which rushed up the narrow ravine of the staircase as up an Alpine couloir white with snow.

CHAPTER II.
OLD JOHN TREVOR.

John Trevor had been a school-master for the greater part of his life. How he acquired so well sounding a name nobody knew. He had no relations, he always said, in the male line, and his friends on his mother’s side were people of undistinguished surnames. And for the first fifty years of his life he had maintained a very even tenor of existence, always respectable, always a man who kept his engagements, paid his way, gave his entire attention, as his circulars said, to the pupils confided to his care; but even in his schoolmastership there was nothing of a remarkable character. After passing many obscure years as an usher, he attained to an academy of his own, in which a sound religious and commercial education was insured, as the same circular informed the parents and guardians of Farafield, by the employment of most competent masters for all the branches included in the course, and by his own unremitting care. But often the masters at Mr. Trevor’s academy were represented solely by himself, and the number of his pupils never embarrassed or overweighted him. The good man, however, worked his way all the same; he kept afloat, which so many find it impossible to do. If the number of scholars diminished he lived harder, when it increased he laid by a little. He was never extravagant, never forgot that his occupation was a precarious one, and thus—turning out a few creditable arithmeticians to fill up the places in the little “offices” of Farafield, the solicitor’s, the auctioneer’s, the big builder’s, and even in the better shops, where they were the best of cashiers, never wrong in a total—he lived on from year to year. His house was but a dingy one, with a large room for his pupils, and two upstairs, shabby enough, in which he lived; but, by dint of sheer continuance and respectability, John Trevor, by the time he was fifty, was as much respected in Farafield as a man leading such a virtuous, colorless, joyless, unblamable existence has a right to be.

But at fifty a curious circumstance happened. John Trevor married. To say that he fell in love would perhaps scarcely represent the case. He had a friend who had been in India and all over the world, and who came home to Farafield with a liver-complaint, and a great deal of money, some people said. Trevor at first did not believe very much in the money. “I have enough to live upon,” his friend said; and what more was necessary? No one knew very well how the money had been made—though that it was honestly acquired there was no doubt. He had been a clerk in an office in Farafield first, then because of his good conduct, which everybody had full faith in, and his business qualities (at which everybody laughed), he was sent to London by his employer, and received into an office there, from which he was sent to India, coming home with this fortune, but with worn-out health, to his native place. “Fortune? you can call it a fortune if you like. It is enough to live on,” John Trevor repeated, “that is all I know about it. To be sure that is a fortune: for to have enough for your old days, and not to be compelled to work, what could a man desire more? But poor Rainy will not enjoy it long,” his old school-fellow added regretfully. Rainy was older by five or six years than John Trevor; but fifty-six does not seem old when one is drawing near that age, though it is a respectable antiquity to youth. Rainy’s sister had been a hard-working woman too; she had been a governess, and then had kept a school; then looked after the children of a widowed brother; and during her whole life had discharged the duties of the supernumerary woman in a large family, taking care of everybody who wanted taking care of. When her brother returned to Farafield she had come to him to be his companion and nurse. He gave her a very nice home, everybody said, with much admiration of the brother’s kindness and the sister’s good-luck. They lived in Swallow Street, in one of the old houses, which were warmer and better built than the new ones, and kept two maids, and had everything comfortable, if not handsome, about, them. When poor Rainy died, Miss Rainy had a great deal of business to do which she did not at all understand. She had to refer to John Trevor perpetually in the first week or two, and she was not young any longer, nor ambitious, the good soul, and nobody had been so kind to her brother as John, and they had known each other all their lives. It came about thus quite naturally that they married. To be sure there were a great many people who said that Trevor married Miss Rainy for her money, as if poor old John at fifty had been able to have his choice of all the lovely young maidens of the district. But this was not the case; neither was it for love they married. They married for mutual support and company, not a bad motive after all. If there had been no money in the case, they would have contented themselves in their loneliness; but as she had a house and an independence, and he an occupation, they “felt justified,” he said to all inquirers, in taking a step which otherwise they might not have contemplated. The consequences, however, were not at all such as they contemplated. Mrs. Trevor began, too late, with the energy of a workman who has no time to lose, the hard trade of a mother. She had one baby after another at headlong speed, losing them almost as soon as they were born, and losing her own health and tranquillity in the process. For some half dozen years the poor soul was either ill or in mourning. And at the end of that period she died. Poor Trevor saved his little Lucy out of the wreck, that was all; there were five or six little mounds in the church-yard besides Mrs. Trevor’s longer one, and so her kind old maidenly existence was over; for before she married she had been universally acknowledged, even by her closest friends, to be an old maid.

It was not till Mrs. Trevor was dead that it became fully known in Farafield that it was no humble competency that had been left to her by her brother, but “an immense fortune.” Neither she nor her husband had known it till long after their marriage. Rainy had been a very clever business man, though his townsfolk all laughed at the idea, and some of his speculations, which had been all but forgotten, turned out at last to be real mines of gold. When it was known what a large, what a fabulous fortune it was, all Rainy’s kindred and connections were roused as one man. They crowded round Trevor, most of them demanding their share, almost all of them fully believing that he had known from the beginning how matters stood, and had married (being so much in request, poor old John!) solely on this inducement; but some of them, on the other hand, showed their admiration by leaving their own little bits of fortune to Lucy, already so liberally endowed. Both of these effects were natural enough. Trevor held his own bravely against them all. Rainy had left his money to his sister; he knew best who deserved it, and it was not for him (Trevor) to annul or allow to be annulled his brother-in-law’s wishes, especially now that Lucilla Rainy (poor thing) had a child to inherit all that belonged to her. He was not illiberal, however, though he was unyielding on the point of law and his child’s rights, and between him and the town-clerk, who was a person of great influence and much trusted in by the surrounding population, the crowd of discontented relations were silenced. As for the others, those who insisted upon leaving their money to Lucy on the old and always popular principle, that to those that have shall be given, Trevor allowed them to do what seemed to them good, and by this treatment it came to pass that the fortune of Lucy acquired several additions. “Money draws money,” the proverb says. Thus this man of fifty-six, with all the restrained and economical habits of a life-time passed in laborious endeavors to make the two ends meet, found himself at the latter end of his life with a great fortune and a motherless baby on his hands. The position in both ways was very strange to him. He gave up the school, generously bestowing the good-will, the furniture, and the remaining pupils on young Philip Rainy, the son of a cousin of his wife. He would not give away his child’s money; but he hoped, he said, that he would always be ready to serve an old friend with that which was his own. And then he gave himself up to the charge of Lucy’s fortune. One thing that was to the credit of John Trevor, all Farafield said, was that he never gave himself any airs or committed any extravagances. He lived on the same income with which his wife and he had begun life, before the great windfalls came which made their little daughter one of the richest heiresses in England. He might have bought himself a great house, set up a carriage, tried to make his way into society. But he did none of these things. He lived on in the old way, without fuss or show, nursed Lucy’s fortune and rolled it into ever-increasing bulk like a snow-ball, and had Lucy nursed as best he might with no woman to help him. How it was that in this respectable and right-minded career there should have occurred the interval of folly in which little Jock came into the world, who can tell? The second Mrs. Trevor was a good woman enough, and had acted for some years as his housekeeper and the superintendent of Lucy’s health and comfort—a comely person, too, which perhaps had something to do with it. But nobody ever dwelt upon this moment of aberration in old Trevor’s life, for his second wife died as his first wife had done, and there would have been an end of the incident but for little Jock. And nobody made much account of him.

When the second Mrs. Trevor died, he gave up housekeeping. Perhaps he was afraid of other risks that might attend him in the same way. When a man is a widower for the second time it is impossible to say what Bluebeard career he may not rush into. In this, as in so many other things, il n’y a que le premier pas qui coûte. After that there is no telling to what lengths you may go. So Trevor wisely withdrew from all hazards. He looked about him carefully, and fixed upon Mrs. Ford, who was a cousin of his first wife. Ford was just then beginning to sigh and make comparisons between his own lot and that of his employer, who was his contemporary, and had just retired with, if not a fortune, at least a competency. “Whereas I shall have to slave on to the end,” Ford said. One evening, however, his wife came out to meet him in high excitement to tell him what had happened.

“He will buy the lease for us,” she said, “and set us up, and then he will take our lodgings. I never should have thought old Trevor would be so liberal; but I suppose it is for poor Lucilla’s sake.”

And next day they went and inspected No. 6 in the Terrace. Mr. and Mrs. Ford felt that it was a solemn moment in their career; they had no children, and they liked to be comfortable, but such a piece of grandeur as a house in the Terrace had never come within the range of their hopes; and Mrs. Ford liked the idea of the cook, and the housemaid, and the parlor-maid. Thus the bargain was made; and though the Fords had not found it quite so delightful as it appeared at first, yet the experiment was, on the whole, a successful one. The household got on as well as it was possible for such a composite household to do. Sometimes a maid would be saucy, and give Mrs. Ford to understand as she knew very well who was the real master; and sometimes Mr. Trevor would make himself disagreeable and find fault with the eggs, or complain of the tea. But barring these rufflings of the rose leaves, all went very well with the house. When she was not thinking of her housekeeping, Mrs. Ford kept a convenient little fund of misery on hand, which she could draw upon at the shortest notice, as to the position in which she and her husband would be left when Mr. Trevor died. Mr. Trevor was now seventy, so that the fear was not unnatural, and she was a woman full of anxieties who liked to have one within reach. Ford was above all this; he knew that they were not to be left with the lease of the house in the Terrace, and nothing more to trust to. For he had become Mr. Trevor’s confidant. It is not so touching a relationship as that which exists at the theater between the first and second ladies, the heroine in white satin and the confidante in muslin; but it is doubtful whether Tilburina ever made revelations more exciting than those over which these two old men wagged their beards—or rather their smooth old chins, well shaven every morning; for at their age and in their condition of life beards were still unknown.

Mr. Trevor was sixty-five when the idea of making his will occurred to him first. Not that he had left Lucy’s fortune in any doubt up to that moment. A brief and concise little document existed in his lawyer’s hands, putting her rights entirely beyond question; but it was years after the making of this first will that the idea occurred to him of shaping out Lucy’s life for her, and settling the course of years after he should have himself passed from the conduct of affairs. He was a man who had lived a very matter-of-fact life; but John Trevor was not a man without imagination. Even in the days when he had least time for such vanities, there had been gleams of fancy about him, and he had always been fond of entering into the circumstances of his pupils, and giving them his advice. They all knew that to have his advice asked was a thing that pleased him. And the management of a great fortune excites the mind and draws forth the imagination. He had to throw himself into all the combinations of speculative money-making, the romance of shares and coupons; and had acquired a sort of divination, a spirit of prophecy, a power of seeing what was about to pay or not to pay. Some men have this power by nature, but few acquire it; and no doubt it had lain dormant in John Trevor all the years during which, having no money to invest, he had not cared to exercise his faculties as to the best investment. When, however, he had made many very successful coups, and eluded many stumbles, and steered triumphantly through some dangers, a sense of his own cleverness and power stole into his heart. He felt that he was a man with great powers of administration, and instincts which it was a thousand pities not to make use of; and it suddenly came into his mind one evening, when he had just added several thousand pounds to Lucy’s fortune by a very successful and clever operation, that he might exercise these powers in a still more effectual way. Ah! if Lucy’s fortune had been a poor little trumpery bit of a fortune, not enough for the girl to live on, it would not have increased like this, it would never have doubled itself, as old Trevor’s money did! Even Providence seemed in the compact, and gave the advantage to the heiress, just as the richer people of the Rainy kindred did, who gave her their money because she had so much already. But this is a digression. As Mr. Trevor thought over the whole question—and naturally Lucy’s fortune, which was his chief occupation, was also the thing that took up most of his thoughts—he could not but feel a vivid regret that it would be impossible to outlive his own ending, and see how the money throve in Lucy’s hands. This seems a whimsical regret, but it is not an unnatural one. Could we only keep a share of what is going on, could we but be sure of seeing our ideas carried out, and assisting at our own dying and burying, and all that would follow after, death would be a much less dismal matter. To be sure, in most cases the penalty of this post-mortem spectatorship would be that we should not see our ideas carried out at all. But this was not what Mr. Trevor looked forward to. He would have been quite content to give up his share in the world, if he could only have kept an eye on the course of events afterward, and retained some power of suggesting, at least, what ought to be done. But even under the most favorable view, the hereafter for which we hope was not likely, Mr. Trevor felt, to permit any active intervention of the disembodied spirit in the matter of stocks or shares. And it was a painful check to him to feel that, in a few years at the most, Lucy’s property and herself would be deprived of the invaluable guidance which his own experience and intelligence would give. It was while this regret was heavy upon him that the idea of making a will suddenly occurred to him—not the ordinary sort of will, a thing which, as already indicated, was made long ago, but a potential and living instrument, by which out of his grave he would still be able to look after the affairs which had cost him so much trouble, and which had so prospered in his hands. The idea stirred him with the liveliest thrill of pleasure. He began the document the very next day, after laying in a stock of paper, large blue folio, lined and crackling, that the very outward form might be absolutely correct. And it was a very remarkable document; it was the romance, the poem of John Trevor’s life. Sitting by himself among his coupons and account books, he had evolved out of his own consciousness, bit by bit, the ideal of a millionaire—nay, of a female millionaire—of an heiress, not in her usual aspect as the prey of fortune-hunters, pursued for love, not of herself, but of her money. The sentimental side of the question did not touch old Trevor at all. He thought of his daughter from a very different point of view. If he ever reflected upon a possible husband for her, it was with great impatience and distaste of the idea. He would rather, if he could, have settled for her that she should never marry. He wanted her to be herself, and not anybody’s wife. All his calculations were for her as she was, Lucy Trevor, not for Mrs. So-and-so. It seemed to him that the woman who would take up his sketch of existence and carry it out, would be something much more worth thinking of than a married lady of the ordinary level. She would be a very important person indeed, in her father’s sketch of her, making what he intended to be a very fine use of her money, and living for that end like a princess. He did not cut off any portion of her duties, because she was a woman; indeed he thought no more of that fact than in so far as it was this which gave him his chief certainty of being able to mold her, and make her life what he wished. He would not, probably, have thought it worth his while to take so much trouble had she been a boy; he would not have had the same faith in her, not the same feeling about her position. It would have been more a matter of course, not so interesting to the fancy. Perhaps a girl, in all cases, answers the purpose of an ideal better than a boy does. Old Trevor did not think much about the question of sex, but instinctively felt that the girl was what he wanted, and it would be impossible to conceive an exercise of the imagination more exciting, more interesting. It was as near like creating a human being as anything could be. Of the character of Lucy—in the flesh, a slim and quiet girl of sixteen—her father knew not very much; but the Lucy who, day by day, developed more and more in the will, became a personage very distinct to him. The manner in which she was to conduct herself in all the difficulties she might meet, was the subject of his continual thoughts; until at last it seemed to the old man that he saw her as in a mirror moving along through the difficulties and perplexities of her life in which his own position would enable him to accompany her and help her with his advice—rather than that he was actually inventing the entire course of her experience for her.

This was the subject upon which Ford was Mr. Trevor’s confidant. He could not have lived all alone in this imaginary world; he had to consult some one, to tell some one of all the developments of his imagination as he traced his heiress through her life. And Ford, you may be sure, liked to know every particular, and was pleased to have a hand in the guidance of so rich a person, and to help to decide how so much money was to be spent. It made him feel as if he were rich himself. He made a very judicious confidant. He agreed in all Mr. Trevor’s ideas in the greater matters, and differed in trifles just enough to show the independence of his judgment; and, as it happened, there was something particularly interesting to Ford in the chapter of Lucy’s future life at which they had now arrived.

CHAPTER III.
THE WILL.

“I think I have got it now, Ford, I think I have got it now,” the old man said, rubbing his hands. “But it has given me a great deal of trouble. Get yourself a chair, and sit down. I want you to hear how I’ve put it. I think, though I don’t want to be conceited, that this time I have hit upon the very thing. Sit down, Ford, and give me your advice.”

Ford found himself a chair, and put it in front of the fire. His feet were close to little Jock on the hearth-rug, but neither did he pay the least attention to little Jock, any more than if he had been a little dog half buried in the fur. The child moved now and then, as his position became fatiguing. He changed now an elbow, now the hand with which he held his book, and sometimes fluttered the pages as he turned them; but these little movements were like the falling of the ashes from the grate, or the little flickers of the flames, and no one took any notice. Jock kept on reading his Shakespeare, wholly absorbed in it; yet as in a dream heard them talking, and remembered afterward, as children do, what they had said.

“Listen!” said Mr. Trevor. He was so eager to read that he had taken his MS. into his hands before his confidant was ready to hear, and waited, clearing his throat while Ford took his seat. Then without a pause, raising his hand to command attention, he began:

“In respect to the future residence of my daughter Lucy, up to the moment of her coming of age, I desire that her time should be divided between two homes which I have selected for her. It is my wish that she should pass the first six months of every year in the house and under the care of Lady Randolph, Park Street, London—”

Here Ford interrupted with an exclamation of astonishment. “Lady Randolph!” he said.

Trevor paused, and uttered his usual chuckle, but with a still livelier note of pleasure in it. “Ah!” he said. “Lady Randolph—that surprises you, Ford. We haven’t many titles among us, have we? But she’s a relation of poor Lucilla’s all the same; or at least she says so,” he added, with another chuckle. “There is nothing like money for opening people’s eyes.”

“A relation of Lucilla’s!” Ford’s amazement was not more genuine than the impression of awe made upon him by the name. “I never knew the Rainys had any rich relations. I suppose you mean Sir Thomas Randolph at the Hall, the lord of the manor, he that was member for the county when I first came here—the present Sir Thomas’s uncle—the—”

“That will do,” said the old man. “It’s not Sir Thomas, but it’s his wife, or his widow, to be exact. She says she is a relation—no, a connection of Lucilla’s—and she ought to know best. She has made me an offer to take charge of Lucy, and introduce her, as she calls it. I’ve been of use to my Lady Randolph in the way of business, and she wants to be of use to me. I don’t ask, for my part, if it’s altogether disinterested. It appears there was a Randolph that married beneath him; I can’t tell you how long ago. My lady,” said old Trevor dryly, “would not break her heart, perhaps, if another Randolph married beneath him, and into the same family too.”

“But,” said Ford, “that would be no reason for putting Lucy in her hands—a poor lamb in the way of the wolf.”

“One wolf is not a bad thing to keep off others; besides, my good fellow, I’ve taken every precaution. Wait till you see,” and he resumed his manuscript, with again a little preparatory clearing of his throat:

“The latter part of the year it is my wish that Lucy should spend in the house which has already been her home for some years, under the charge of her other relations, Richard Ford and Susan, his wife, who have been her fast friends since ever she can recollect, and to whom for this purpose I hereby give and bequeath the said house, No. 6 in the Terrace, in the parish of Farafield, in the hundred of—”

“Stop a bit!” said Ford feebly; he was overcome by his feelings. “‘Her fast friends,’” he repeated, “that’s just what we are. We’ve loved her like our own, that’s what we’ve always done, Susan and me. And as for Susan, many’s the time she has said, ‘Supposing anything was to happen, or any change to occur, what should we do without Lucy? It would be like losing a child of our own.’”

“Then you approve?” Trevor said. He liked to receive the full expression of the gratitude which was his due.

“Approve!” said Ford. When a man without any natural dignity to speak of is moved tearfully, the effect is sometimes less pathetic than ludicrous; the good man did all but cry. “It isn’t the property, Mr. Trevor, it’s the trust,” he said, with a restrained sob. “But one thing I’ll promise, it sha’n’t be a trust betrayed. We’ll watch over her night and day. There shall be no wolf come near her while she’s with Susan and me.”

“In moderation! in moderation!” said the old man, waving his hand. “I don’t want her to be watched night and day; something must be left to Lucy herself.”

“Ah!” said Ford, drawing a long breath. He had the air of a man who was ready to patrol under his ward’s window with a pair of pistols. “Lucy has a great deal of sense, but to expose a girl to the wiles of a set of fortune-hunters is what I would never do—and with that worldly-minded old woman. Ah! Mr. Trevor, you’re too kind, you’re too kind. Lady Randolph is not one that would step out of her own sphere for nothing. It isn’t any desire she has to be kind to you.”

“Her own sphere,” said Mr. Trevor. “Money levels all spheres. And Lucy is an heiress, which makes her equal to a prince of the blood. But,” he added, with a chuckle, snapping his fingers, “that for the fortune-hunters! I’ve put bolt and bar between them and their prey. It’s all done in black and white, and I don’t know who can go against it. Listen, Ford.

“It is further my wish, and I hereby stipulate that my said daughter, Lucy, shall contract no marriage up to the age hereinafter mentioned without the consent of the following parties, who will consider themselves as a sort of committee for the disposal of her hand, and whom I hereby appoint and constitute her guardians, so far as this subject is concerned; it being fully understood that this appointment does not confer any power or authority over her pecuniary concerns. The committee which I thus charge with the arrangement of her marriage is to consist of the three persons above mentioned, to wit, Dame Elena Randolph, Richard Ford, and Susan Ford, his wife, with the following assessors added: Robert Rushton, Esq., town clerk of Farafield, my old friend; the Rev. William Williamson, of the Congregational Chapel, my pastor; and Mrs. Maria Stone, school-mistress, of the same place—”

“But, Mr. Trevor!” Ford ejaculated with a gasp. The paragraph he had just listened to took away his breath.

“Well? out with your objections; let us hear them,” said old Trevor, turning upon him, brisk and lively, and ready for war.

“Objections! yes, I can not deny it, I have objections,” said Ford, hesitating. “Mr. Trevor, you know better than I do, you that have had such quantities of money passing through your hands; but—”

“Out with it,” said Trevor; he rubbed his hands. It was an amusement the more to him to have his arrangements questioned.

“You can’t have taken everything into consideration. Six people—six, all so different. If she has to get all their consents, she will never marry at all.”

“And no great harm done either,” said old Trevor briefly, “if that is all. Why should she marry? A woman who is poor, who wants somebody to work for her, that is comprehensible; but a woman with a lot of money, there is no reason why she shouldn’t stay as she is. What should she get married for?”

Ford scratched his head; he did not quite make it out. This was a challenge to all his convictions. It touched, he felt, the very first prerogative of man. Where were all true foundations of primal supremacy and authority to go to, if it were once set up as a rule that marriage was no longer necessary to womankind?

“It’s always a good thing for a woman to marry,” he said hoarsely. Many a radical opinion he had heard from his lodger, but never anything so sweeping as this.

“Ah! you think so,” said old Trevor. “There was poor Lucilla, to go no further. She might have been alive yet, and enjoying her good fortune, if she had not married me.”

This disturbed still more the man of orthodox ideas; he could do nothing but stare at the old revolutionary. What might he not say next?

“I suppose,” he said, after awhile, “poor Lucilla would never have hesitated; she was a woman who never considered her own comfort, in comparison with doing her duty.”

“Her duty, poor soul! how was it her duty to marry me? Poor thing, I’ve always been very sorry for her,” said Trevor. “Women have hard times in this world. But a girl with a great fortune, she may be kept out of it.” Here he paused, while his companion sat opposite to him, his very mouth open with amazement. It was indeed more than amazement, it was consternation which filled the honest mind of Richard Ford. He did not know what to think of this; was it a new phase of Radicalism worse than any that had gone before? He would have said it was Popery if he had not known how far from any ideas of that description his old friend was. While he sat thus half stupefied with astonishment, old Trevor took up his pen again hastily. “Now I think of it,” he said, “Lucy belongs to the country, I don’t hold much with the Church, but the Church should have a hand in it. I’ll add the rector to the committee. That will be only a proper respect.”

“The rector!” said Ford, pale with wonder, “and Mr. Williamson at the chapel, and Mr. Rushton, and Mrs. Stone, and me—”

“You forget Lady Randolph,” said old Trevor, with a chuckle; “that’s exactly as it ought to be, all classes represented, the right thing for a girl in Lucy’s position. To tell the truth,” he added, laying down his pen, “I don’t know that there ever was a girl in Lucy’s position before. It’s a very fine position, and I hope she’s been brought up to feel all the responsibilities. I don’t want to brag of myself; but given an unusual situation like hers, and I think I’ve hit the right thing for it. When you are born a great lady that’s different; but a girl with the greatest fortune in England, proceeding out of the lower classes—”

“I don’t see,” said Ford, aggrieved, “that we need call ourselves the lower classes; the middle—that is about what it is—the middle class—the strength of the country.”

“Bosh!” said Trevor, “she will go to Lady Randolph’s, and there she will see fine people, and no doubt she’ll be courted. There is nobody like them for knowing the value of money; and then she will come to you, Dick Ford, where she will see nobody, or else a few young clerks and that sort.”

“I assure you,” said Ford solemnly, “I will take care that she shall see no one here; not a man shall enter the house, not a creature come near her, while she is under my care.”

“That will be lively for Lucy,” said the old man, “you numskull! If she never sees any one, how is she to make a choice?”

“Mr. Trevor,” said Ford, with a voice so solemn and serious that it trembled, “you would not wish your heiress to make a choice among the young clerks? Whom you say,” he added after a moment, in a tone of offense, “she will meet here.”

“She is not my heiress, you stupid fellow. She is Lucilla’s heiress, poor Rainy’s heiress; what was he but a young clerk? Why shouldn’t she, if she likes, marry into her own class? That’s your snobbishness, Ford. You will find nothing of that in me. If she likes a man who is in the same rank of life as Rainy was when he began to make his fortune, or as I was (when I was that age), why let her marry him in Heaven’s name and be happy—that is,” said old Trevor, chuckling, “if she can get her guardians to consent.”

“Mr. Trevor,” said Ford hurriedly, with the tremulousness of real feeling, “I must protest, I must really protest. I am very conscious of the great kindness you are showing to us; but I can not sit quiet and see poor Lucy doomed to such a fate. She will never get all her guardians to consent. Put it into one person’s hands, whom you please, but for goodness’ sake don’t leave the poor thing to fight with half a dozen; the end will be that she will never be married at all.”

“And that won’t kill her,” said Trevor. “Do you think I want her to marry? Not a bit, not a bit. ‘She is better if she so abide.’ Don’t you know who said that? And I agree with St. Paul, whatever you may do.”

Now the idea of not agreeing with St. Paul was terrible to Ford; it scandalized him utterly; for he was a Low Churchman, and much devoted to the writer of the Epistles.

“There never could be any question on that point,” he said, “if you ask me whether I believe in my Bible, Mr. Trevor; but I can not pretend that I understand that passage. There is more in it, I make bold to say, than meets the eye. There’s a type in it, or a similitude. I am not a learned man, I can’t tell you what it is in the original, but there’s more in it than we think.”

Old Trevor laughed—he was quite as stanch a believer as his friend; but being a Congregationalist, he was naturally a little more at his ease on such subjects than even the lowest of Churchmen. He was not shocked by the idea that it might be possible not to agree with St. Paul, and he was not so sure of the hidden meaning.

“It is quite enough for me as it stands,” he said; “and as for Lucy’s marriage—”

Here there was an interruption that startled these old conspirators. Little Jocky, who had been lying as still as a mouse at their feet, with no movement except that of turning a leaf of his book, now began to stir. They had forgotten his very existence, as they often did. He had not been paying much attention to them, but probably he had heard other sounds more interesting to him, which they, on the other hand, had taken no notice of. At this stage he suddenly jumped up on his feet like a little acrobat, startling them greatly. He was not at all unlike an acrobat, with his long, slim, pliable limbs, and his faded suit of blue velveteen, a little short in the arms, and white in the seams. He got up with a bound, like a thing on springs, immediately under Mr. Ford’s nose, who was much discomfited by the sudden movement. It was a thing that had happened before, but Mr. Ford had confessed that it was not a thing to which he could accustom himself. He was not used to children, and he was nervous; little Jock’s jump made him jump too.

“What is it? What is the matter?” he cried.

But just then the door softly opened behind the screen, and a soft voice said, “I have come home, papa, I have come to take Jock for his walk. Do you want anything?”

“Not that I know of, my dear, not that I know of; except yourself, and I shall have you by and by,” said the old man, his countenance expanding. She was not visible behind the high screen, but her voice seemed to throw a new element, something of softness and comfort into the air.

“At tea, papa. Come, Jock,” said the voice; and the little fellow was gone almost before the words were said. The two old men sat quite silent, and listened to the steps going down the stairs. It was not an unusual incident, but it is scarcely possible not to feel an uneasy sensation when you have been discussing, much more deciding, the fate of another, and suddenly that other looks in and interrupts your secret combinations by the sound of an innocent and affectionate voice. Such unconsciousness is more trying to a conspirator than any suspicion of his motives. Even when it is a private consultation between a father and mother on the expediency of sending a child to school, with what compunctions the sudden appearance of the unconscious victim overwhelms them! Old Trevor himself was moved by it, though he was not a likely subject for penitence.

“She hasn’t much notion what we’re settling,” he said. “Poor little Lucy! I wonder if it’s a good thing for a bit of a girl to have such a fate before her. But it is a fine position—a fine position; not many have such a chance, and I hope I’ve bred her up to understand what it is.”

“Poor child!” Ford breathed, in a sigh which was not unmingled with personal feeling; for notwithstanding the substantial advantages promised to him, and the gratifying character of the trust conferred, there already began to appear before the good man, not too confident in his own firmness or force of character, a crowd of difficulties to come. How would he be able to resist if a fine lady like Lady Randolph took him in hand? And how would Susan stand out against cajoling? He sighed, beginning to foresee that it would not be unmixed happiness to be Lucy’s guardian even for six months in the year. But Lucy’s appearance, or rather Lucy’s voice had disturbed the sitting effectually. Mr. Trevor folded up his blue manuscript, and put it back into the blotting-book, and he lifted the “Times” from the little table on which it had been spread out, and once more arranged it on his knees.

“We’ll go into further detail,” he said, “another time, I’ll give you the help of all my lights, Dick Ford. You’ll want them to steer your way clear, and you can tell Susan there sha’n’t be any want of money. That is what she’ll think of first.”

“I hope, Mr. Trevor, that you don’t think money is the only thing we think of, either Susan or me.”

“It is a very important thing,” said the old man. “I have been poor, and now I am rich, and it isn’t a matter that will let itself be kept in the background. But you shall have plenty of money, tell Susan so, and for other things you must do your best.”

“I hope we’ll do that in any case,” Ford said devoutly, and he went down-stairs with nervous solemnity, holding his head very high. He was very conscientious even in the smallest matters, and it may be supposed that this tremendous call upon him, as soon as he began to realize it, went to the very depths of that conscience which was alert and anxious in the minutest affairs. Old Trevor watched him disappear behind the screen, waited till the door had audibly closed behind him, then with a chuckling laugh resumed his newspaper.

“I’ve given him something to think about,” he said, with a grin of mischievous satisfaction to himself.

CHAPTER IV.
SISTER AND BROTHER.

From the two old men and their consultations it was a relief, even in that chilly and dismal day, to get outside into the free air, though it was heavy with the chill of moisture turning into frost. It was not a cheerful world outside. The sky was the color of lead, and hung low in one uniform tint of dullness over the wet world, with all its wetness just on the point of congealing. The common stretched out its low green broken lines and brown divisions of path to touch the limited horizon. Mrs. Stone’s school, the big white house which stood on the north side, had a sort of halo of mist hanging round it, and everything that moved moved drearily, as unable to contend against the depression in the air. But little Jock Trevor was impervious to that depression; it was the moment of all the twenty-four hours in which he was happy. Though he had lain as still on the rug as if there was no quicksilver at all in his little veins he could scarcely stand quietly now to have his little great-coat put on, which his sister did with great care. She was seventeen, a staid little person, with much composure of manners, dressed in a gray walking-dress, trimmed with gray fur, very neat, comfortable, and sensible, but not quite becoming to Lucy, who was of that kind of fair complexion which tends toward grayness; fair hair, with no color in it, and a face more pale than rosy. Ill-natured people said of her that she was all the same color, hair, cheeks, and eyes—which was not true, and yet so far true as to make the gray dress the least favorable envelope that could have been chosen. There was no irregularity of any kind about her appearance; all was exact, the very impersonation of neatness; a ribbon awry, an irregularity of line anywhere, would have been a relief, but no such relief was afforded to the spectator. Whoever might be found fault with for untidiness in Mrs. Stone’s establishment, it never was Lucy; her collars were always spotless; her ribbons always neatly tied; her dress the very perfection of good order and completeness. She put on her brother’s little coat, and buttoned it to the last button, though he was dancing all the time with impatience; then enveloped his throat with a warm woolen scarf, and tucked in the ends. “Now your gloves, Jocky,” she said, and she would not move till he had dragged these articles on, and had them buttoned in their turn. “What does it matter if you are two minutes earlier or later,” she said, “you silly little Jock? far better to have them buttoned before you go out than to struggle with them all the way. Now, have you got your handkerchief, and has your hat been brushed properly? Well,” Lucy added, surveying him with mingled satisfaction in the result and reluctance to allow it to be complete, “now we may go.”

If she had not held him by the hand, there is no telling what caracoling Jock might have burst into by way of exhausting the first outburst of exhilaration. The contact with the fresh air, though it was not anything very lively in the way of air, moved all the childhood in his veins. He strained Lucy’s arm, as a hound strains at a leash, jumping about her as they went on. Almost her staid steps were beguiled out of their usual soft maidenly measure by the gambols of the little fellow.

“Let’s have a run to the gate,” he said. “Oh, Lucy, come, run me to the gate,” and he dragged at her hand to get loose from its hold. But when he escaped Jock did not care to run alone. He came back to her, out of breath.

“I wish I could have a real run—just once,” he said, with a sigh; then brightening up, “or a wrestling like Shakespeare. I’ll tell you who I’d like to be, Lucy; I’d like to be Orlando when he had just killed that big bully of a man—”

“Jock! you wouldn’t like to kill any one, I hope?”

“Oh, shouldn’t I!” cried the boy; “just to see him go down, and turn over on his face, and clinch his hands. Do they always do that, I wonder? You see them in the pictures all with their fists clinched, clawing at the ground. Well,” he added, with magnanimity, “he needn’t quite die, you know; I’d like him only to be badly hurt, as bad as if he were killed, and then to get better. I dare say,” said the child, “Charles got better, you know, after Orlando threw him. It isn’t said that he was regularly killed.”

“Is it a pretty story you’ve been reading, dear?” said Lucy, sweetly, altogether ignorant of Orlando. And she was not ashamed of her ignorance, nor did Jock know that she had any reason to be ashamed.

“That’s the best bit,” he said, impartially. “The rest is mostly about girls. It was the Duke’s wrestler, you know, a big beast like—oh, I don’t know anybody so big—a drayman,” said Jock, as a big wagon lumbered by, laden with barrels, with one of those huge specimens of humanity (and beer) moving along like a clumsy tower by its side. “Like him; and Orlando was quite young, you know, not so very big—like me, when I am grown up.”

“You don’t know what you will be when you are grown up, you silly little boy. Perhaps you will never grow up at all,” said Lucy, somewhat against her conscience improving the occasion.

Jock stood for a moment with wide open eyes. Then resumed:

“I sha’n’t be big or fat like that fellow—when I am about seventeen, or perhaps twenty-two, and never taught to box or anything. I would have gone in at him,” cried Jock, throwing out his poor arm, with a very tightly clinched woolen glove at the end of it, “just like Orlando, just like this; and down he’d go, like, like—” But imagination did not serve him in this particular. “Like Charles did,” he concluded, with a dropping of his voice, which betrayed a consciousness of the failure, not in grammar, but in force of metaphor. Jock’s experience did not furnish any parallel incident.

“You must never fight when you grow up,” said Lucy. “Gentlemen never do; except when they are soldiers, and have to go and fight for the queen.”

“Does the queen want to be fighted for?” said Jock. “If any fellow was to bully her or hit her—”

“Oh,” cried Lucy, horrified, “nobody would do that, but people sometimes go against the country, Jock, and then the people that are fighting for England are said to be fighting for the queen.”

Jock’s mind, however, went astray in the midst of this discourse. There passed the pair in the road a very captivating little figure—a small boy, much smaller even than Jock, with long fair locks streaming down his shoulders, in the most coquettish of dresses, mounted upon a beautiful cream-colored pony, as tiny as its rider. What child could pass this little equestrian and not gaze after him? The children sighed out of admiration and envy when they saw him, for he was a very well-known figure about Farafield; but the elders shook their heads and said, “Poor child!” Why should the old people say “Poor child!” and the young ones regard him with such admiring eyes? It was little Gerald Ridout, the son of the circus proprietor. Nobody was better known. As he rode along, the most daring little rider, on his pretty little Arab, which was as pretty as himself, with his long flowing curls waving, there could have been no such attractive advertisement. The circus traveled for a great part of the year, but its home was in Farafield, and everybody knew little Gerald. Jock fixed his glistening eyes upon him from the moment of his appearance—eyes that shone with pleasure and sympathy, and that wistful longing to be as beautiful and happy, which is not envy. There was nothing of the more hateful sentiment in little Jock’s heart, but because he admired he would have liked to resemble, had that been within his power. He followed the child with his eyes as long as he was visible. Then he asked, “Do people who are rich have ponies, Lucy?” with much gravity and earnestness.

“Very often, dear, and horses too; but that poor little fellow is not rich, you know.”

“I should like to be him,” said Jock.

“A little circus-boy? to ride upon the stage, and have all the most horrid people staring at you?”

“And jump through the hoop, and gallop, gallop, and have a pony like that all to myself. A—h!” Jock cried with a long-drawn breath.

“Would you like a pony so very much, Jocky? Then some day you shall have one,” said his sister in her tranquil voice. “I will buy you one when I am rich.”

“Are you soon going to be rich?” said the little boy doubtfully. Like wiser people, he preferred the smallest bird in the hand to a whole aviary in the dim and doubtful distance. But Lucy had not a very lively sense of humor. She knew the circumstances better than he did, and said, “Hush! hush!” with a little awe.

“Not for a very long time, I hope,” she said.

Her little brother looked at her with wondering eyes; but this mystery was too deep for him to solve. He had no insight into those deep matters which occupied his father’s time, nor had he the least notion that Lucy’s wealth depended upon that father’s death, though it had all been discussed with so much detail day by day over his dreaming head.

“When you are rich, shall I be rich too, Lucy?” he said.

“I am afraid not, Jock; but if I am rich, it will not matter; you shall have whatever you please. Won’t that do just as well?”

Jock paused and thought.

“Why shouldn’t I be rich too?” he remarked. It was not said as a question; it was an observation. The fact did not trouble him, but en passant he noticed it as a thing which might perhaps want explaining. It was not of half so much importance, however, as the next thing that came into his head.

“I say, Lucy, do you think that boy on the pony has to go to school? What do you think he can be learning at school? I should like to go there too.”

“When you go, it shall be to a much nicer place,” she said, with energy. “There is one thing I should like to be rich for, and that is for you, little Jock. You don’t know anything at all yet. You ought to be learning Greek and Latin, and mathematics, and a great many other things. It makes me quite unhappy when I think of it. I go to school, but it does not matter for me; and you are living all your time, not learning anything, reading nonsense on the hearth-rug. I could cry when I think of it,” Lucy said. She said it very quietly, but this was vehemence in her.

Jock looked up at her with wondering eyes; for his own part he had no enthusiasm for study, nor, except for the pleasure of being with the circus boy, whom he vaguely apprehended as caracoling about the very vague place which his imagination conceived of as “School,” on his pretty pony, had he any desire to be sent there; but it did not occur to him to enter into any controversy on the subject.

“Are you going up-town, Lucy?” he asked; “have you got to go to shops again? I wish you would buy all your ribbons at one time, and not be always, always buying more. Aunty Ford when she goes out goes to shops too, and you have to stand and stare about, and there’s nothing to look at, and nothing to do.”

“What would you like to do, Jock?”

“Oh, I don’t know—nothing,” said the boy; “if I had a pony I’d get on its back and ride off a hundred miles before I stopped.”

“The horse couldn’t go a hundred miles, nor you either, dear.”

“Oh, yes, I could, or ten at least, and if I met any one on the road I’d run races with him; and I’d call the horse Black Bess, or else Rozinante, or else Chiron; but Chiron wasn’t only a horse, you know, he was a horseman.”

“Well, dear,” said Lucy, calmly, “I wish you were a horseman, too, if you would like it so very much.”

“You don’t understand,” cried the child, “you don’t understand! I couldn’t be like Chiron; he had four legs, he was a man-horse. He brought up a little boy once, lots of little boys, and taught them. I say, Lucy, if Chiron was living now I should like to go to school to him.”

“You are a silly little boy,” said Lucy. “Who ever heard of a school-master that had four legs? I wonder papa lets you read so many silly books.”

“They are not silly books at all; it is only because you don’t know,” said Jock, reddening. “Suppose we were cast on a desert island, what would you do? You don’t know any stories to tell round the fire; but I know heaps of stories, I know more stories than any one. Aunty Ford is pretty good,” the little fellow went on, reflectively: “she knows some; and she likes me to tell her out of Shakespeare, and about the ‘Three Calenders’ and the ‘Genii in the Bottle,’ and that improves her mind; but if you were in a desert island what should you do? You don’t know one story to tell.”

“I should cook your suppers, and mend your clothes, and make the fire.”

“Ah!” said the boy with a little contempt; “bread and milk would do, you know, or when we shot a deer we’d just put him before the fire and roast him. We shouldn’t want much cooking; and the skin would do for clothes.”

“You would not be at all comfortable like that,” said Lucy gravely, shocked by the savagery of the idea; “even Robinson Crusoe had to sew the skins together and make them into a coat; and how could you have milk,” she added, “without some one to milk the cow?”

“I will tell you something that is very strange,” said Jock: “Aunty Ford never read ‘Robinson Crusoe;’ but she knows Christian off by heart, and all about Mary and Christiana and the children. And she knows the history of Joseph, and David, and Goliath; so you can not say she is quite ignorant; and she makes me tell her quantities of things.”

“You should not mix up your stories,” said Lucy; “the Bible is not like other books. About Joseph and David and those other—” (Lucy had almost said gentlemen, which seemed the most respectful expression; but she paused, reflecting with a little horror that this was too modern and common a title for Bible personages). “They are for Sunday,” she went on, more severely, to hide her own confusion; “they are not like ‘Robinson Crusoe’ or the ‘Genii in the Bottle;’ you ought not to mix them up.”

“It is Christian that is the most Sunday,” said Jock; “she explains it to me, and all what it means, about the House Beautiful and the ladies that lived there. There is a Punch, Lucy! and there’s Cousin Philip; never mind him, but run, run, and let us have a good look at the Punch.”

“I mustn’t run,” said Lucy, holding him back, “and I can not stand and look at Punch. If Mrs. Stone were to see me she never would let me come out with you any more.”

“Oh, run, run!” cried the little boy, straining at her hand like a hound in a leash. He had dragged her half across the street when Cousin Philip came up. This was the only other relative with whom Mr. Trevor had kept up any intercourse. He was the young man to whom the old school-master had made over his school, and he, too, like Lucy, was taking advantage of the half holiday. In Farafield, where young men were scarce, Philip Rainy had already made what his friends called a very good impression. He was not, it was true (to his eternal confusion and regret) a University man; but neither was he a certified school-master. He had greatly raised the numbers of old John Trevor’s school, and he occupied a kind of debatable position on the borders of gentility, partly because of his connection with the enriched family perhaps, but partly because his appearance and manners were good, and his aspirations were lofty from a social point of view. He had begun with a determination, to resist steadily all claims upon him from below, and to assert courageously a right to stand upon the dais of Farafield society; and though there may be many discouragements in the path of a young man thus situated, it is astonishing how soon a steady resolution of this kind begins to tell. He had been five years in old John Trevor’s school, and already many people accredited him with a B.A. to his name. Philip told no fibs on that or any subject that concerned his position. “When it was necessary,” as he said, he was perfectly frank on the subject; but there are so few occasions on which it is necessary to be explanatory, a modest man does not thrust himself before the notice of the world; and he was making his way—he was making an impression. Though he had been brought up a Dissenter like his uncle, he had soon seen the entire incompatibility of Sectarianism with society, and he had now the gratification of hearing himself described as a sound if moderate churchman. And he was now permanently upon the list of men who were asked to the dinner-parties at the rectory, when single men were wanted to balance a superabundance of ladies, an emergency continually recurring in a country town. This of itself speaks volumes. Philip Rainy was making his way.

He was a slim and a fair young man, bearing a family resemblance to his cousin Lucy; and he had always been very “nice” to Lucy and to Jock. He came up to them now to solve all their difficulties, taking Jock’s eager hand out of his sister’s, and arresting their vehement career.

“Stop here, and I’ll put you on my shoulder, Jock; you’ll see a great deal better than among the crowd, such a little fellow as you are; and Lucy will talk to me.”

They made a very pretty group, as they stood thus at a respectful distance from Punch and his noisy audience, Jock mounted on his cousin’s shoulder, clapping his hands and crowing with laughter, while Lucy stood, pleased and smiling, talking to Philip, who was always so “nice.” The passers-by looked at them with an interest which was inevitable in the circumstances. Wherever Lucy went people looked at her and pointed her out as the heiress, and naturally the young man who was her relation was the subject of many guesses and speculations. To see them standing together was like the suggestion of a romance to all Farafield. Were they in love with each other? Would she marry him? To suppose that Philip, having thus the ball at his foot, should not be “after” the heiress, passed all belief.

But the talk that passed between them, and which suggested so many things to the lookers-on, was of the most placid kind.

“How is my uncle?” Philip asked. Old John Trevor was not his uncle, but the difference between age and youth made the cousinship resolvable into a more filial bond, and it sounded much nearer, which pleased the young man. “May I come and see him one of these evenings, Lucy? I am dining out to-day and to-morrow; but Friday perhaps—”

“How many people you must know!” said Lucy, half admiring, half amused; for young persons at school have a very keen eye for everything that looks like “showing off.”

“Yes, I know a good many people—thanks chiefly to you and my uncle.”

“To me? I don’t know anybody,” said Lucy.

“But they know you; and to be a cousin to a great heiress is a feather in my cap.”

Lucy only smiled; she was neither pleased nor annoyed by the reference, her fortune was so familiar a subject to her. She said, “Papa will be glad to see you. But I must not stand here on the street; Mrs. Stone will be angry; and I think Jock must have seen enough.”

“Don’t knock my hat off, Jock. Have you seen enough? I will walk with you to the Terrace,” said Philip, and the little family group as they went along the street attracted a great deal of interest. What more natural than that Philip should be “nice” to his young cousins, and turn with them when he met them on a half holiday? and it is so good to be seen to have relations who are heiresses for a young man who is making his way.

CHAPTER V.
AFTERNOON TALK.

The children, as they were called in the Terrace, came home just in time for tea. Mr. Trevor had changed the course of his existence for some time past. He who all his life had dined at two, and had tea at six, and “a little something” in the shape of supper before he went to bed, had entirely revolutionized his own existence by the troublesome invention of “late dinner,” which Mrs. Ford thought was the suggestion of the Evil One himself. His reason for it was the same as that of many other changes which he had made at some cost to his own comfort, but he did not explain to any one what this meant—at least, if he did explain it, it was to Lucy, and Lucy was the most discreet of confidantes. When she came in with her little brother the Fords were seating themselves at the table in their parlor, on which were the tray and the tea-things, and a large plate of substantial bread and butter. Here Jock took his place with the old people, while Lucy went upstairs. She would have liked the bread and butter, too, but her father liked her to spend this hour with him, and he despised the modern invention of five o’clock tea, understanding that meal only, as the Fords did, who made themselves thoroughly comfortable, and had muffins sometimes, and a variety of pleasing adjuncts. Mr. Trevor was still sitting between the fire and the window when Lucy went upstairs. She had taken off her hat and out-door jacket, and went in to her father a spruce little gray maiden, with hair as smooth and everything about her as neat as if she had just come out of a bandbox. In Mr. Trevor’s rank of life there is no personal virtue in a woman that tells like neatness. He looked at her with eyes full of fond satisfaction and pleasure. He had put away the “Times” from his knees, and now had a book, having finished his paper, which lasted him till about four o’clock, and then went down-stairs to Mr. Ford. The books Mr. Trevor read were chiefly travels. He did not think novels were improving to the mind; and as for history and solid information at his age, what was the use of them? they could serve very little purpose in his case: though Lucy ought to read everything that was instructive. He put down his book open, on its face, on his knee when his daughter came in. His eyes dwelt upon her with genuine pleasure and pride as she took the chair in which Ford had been sitting. She had some knitting in her hand, which she began to work at placidly without looking at it. Lucy with her blue eyes, her fair smooth hair, and her equally smooth gray dress without a crease in it, looked the very impersonation of good order and calm. She looked at her father tranquilly with a pleasant smile. She was no chattering girl with a necessity of talk upon her. Even among the other girls at Mrs. Stone’s Lucy was never, as Mrs. Ford said, “one to talk.” She waited for what should be said to her.

“Well,” said her father, rubbing his hands, “and where have you been, Lucy, to-day?”

“Up into the High Street, papa.”

“I think you are fond of the High Street, Lucy?”

“I don’t know. The common is very wet, and Jock will run and jump. I don’t like it in this weather. The High Street is dry and clean—at least it is dry and clean in front of Ratcliffe’s shop.

“And there are all the pretty things in the windows.”

“I don’t look at the things in the windows—what is the good? You would let me buy them all if I wanted them,” said Lucy, quietly.

“Every one!” said old Trevor, with a chuckle. “Every one! You might have a new dress every day of the year, if you liked!”

Lucy smiled; she went on with her knitting. This delightful possibility did not seem to affect her much—perhaps because it was a possibility.

“We met the little circus-boy on his pony,” she said. “Jock thinks so much of him. Papa, you always let me have everything I want—might I have a pony for Jock? It would make him so happy.”

“No,” said old Trevor, succinctly. “For yourself as many you like; but that sort of thing is not for the child. No, nothing of that sort.”

“Why?” she said, with something which in Lucy was impatience and vexation. It was too slight a ruffling of the calm surface to have told at all in any one else.

“Because, my dear, Jock must not have anything that is above his own rank in life. What should he do with a pony? He is not a gentleman’s son to be bred up with foolish notions. It would be all the worse for him to find out the difference afterward.”

“But he is my brother,” Lucy said, “and your son, papa. If he is not a gentleman’s son neither am I— How is he different from me? And do you think I can make such a difference when—when I am grown up—”

“You mean when I am dead? Say it out. Isn’t that what I’m always thinking of? The little boy, my dear,” said old Trevor, gravely, yet with his familiar chuckle breaking in, “is a mistake. He didn’t ought to have been at all, Lucy. Now he’s here, we can’t help it—we’ve got to put up with it; and we must make the best of him. We can’t send him out of the world because it was a mistake his coming into it; but he must keep to his own rank in life.”

“But, papa, if you would think a little why should there be such a difference? I so rich—and if he is to have nothing—”

“He will be as well off as he has any right to be,” said old Trevor. “I’ve laid by a little. Don’t trouble yourself about Jock. What have you been doing to-day? That is the thing of the greatest importance. I want to know all my little lady is about.”

“We had our French lesson,” said Lucy, a little disturbed under her smooth surface; but the disturbance was so little that her father never found it out, “and—all the rest just as usual, papa.”

“And can you understand what mounsheer says? Can you talk to him? I used to know a few words myself, but never to talk it,” said the old man. His acuteness seemed to have deserted him, and turned into the most innocent simplicity—a little glow came upon his face. He was almost childishly excited on this point.

“A few words were enough for me—what did I want with French?—though things are altered now; and it’s taught, I’m told, in every commercial academy, and the classics neglected. That wasn’t the way in my time. If a boy learned anything besides reading and writing it was Latin; and I was considered very successful with my Latin.”

“That is another thing, papa,” said Lucy; “don’t you think Jock should go to school?”

Old Trevor’s face extended slightly. “Have you nothing to say to me, Lucy, but about Jock?”

“Oh, yes, a great deal,” said the girl. She did not lose a single change in his face, though she kept on steadily with her knitting, and she saw it was not safe to go further. She changed the subject at once. “Monsieur says I get on very well,” she said; “but not so well as Katie Russell. She is first in almost everything. She is so clever. You should hear her chatter French—as fast! It is like the birds in the trees, as pretty to listen to—and just as little sense that you can make out.”

“Yes, yes, yes!” said the old man, with a little impatience, “There is no occasion for you to learn like that, Lucy. She has to make her living by it, that girl. I wonder now, you that are in so very different a position, why it’s always this Russell girl you talk about, and never any of the real ladies, the Honorable Miss Barringtons and Lady—what do you call her?—and the better sort. It was for them I sent you to Mrs. Stone’s school, Lucy,” he said, with a tone of reproach.

“Yes, papa. I like them very well—they are just like me. They do as little work as they can, and get off everything they can. We had a famous ride—but that was yesterday. I told you about it. Lily Barrington’s horse ran away, or we thought it ran away; and mine set off at such a pace! I was dreadfully frightened, but Lily liked it. She had done it on purpose, fancy! and thinks there is nothing in the world so delightful as a gallop.”

“And you call her Lily?” said Mr. Trevor, with a glow of pleasure; “that’s right, my dear. That’s what I like to hear. Not that I want you to neglect the others, Lucy; but you can always get a hold on the poor; no fear of them; I want you to secure the great ones, too. I want you to know all sorts. You ought to with your prospects. I was saying to Ford to-day a girl with your prospects belongs to England. The country has an interest in you, Lucy. You ought to know all sorts, rich and poor. That is just what I have been settling,” he said, laying his hand on the blotting-book now closed, in which his papers were.

Lucy gave him a little smile nodding her head. She was evidently quite in the secret of the document there. But she did not stop her knitting, nor was she so much interested in that future which he was settling for her so carefully as to ask any questions. Her little nod, her smile which had a kind of indulgence in it, as for the vagaries of a child, her soft calm and indifference bore the strangest contrast to his absorption in all that concerned her. Perhaps the girl did not realize how entirely her future was being mapped out; perhaps she did not realize that future at all. There was a touch of the gentlest youthful contempt for that foolish wisdom of our fathers to which we are all instinctively superior in our youth, in her perfect composure. It amused him—though it was so odd that a man should be amused in such a way—and it did not matter any further to her.

“Mrs. Stone sent her kind regards, papa, and she will gladly come over and take a cup of tea any time you like.”

“Oh, she’ll come, will she? I want to tell her of something I’ve put in the will,” said old Mr. Trevor.

This roused Lucy from her composure. She looked at him with a half-startled glance.

“You will tell—her—of that paper?”

“Well, not much about it—only something that regards herself. You will be much sought after when I am gone. All sorts of people will be after you for your money; and I want to protect you, Lucy. It’s my business to protect you. Besides, as I tell you, you’re too important to have just a couple of guardians, like a little girl with ten thousand pounds. You belong to the country, my dear. A fortune like yours,” said the old man, now launched upon his favorite subject, “is a thing by itself; and I want to protect you, my dear.”

This time Lucy, instead of the smile, breathed a little sigh. It was a sigh of impatience, very momentary, very slight. This was the doctrine in which she had been brought up, and she would as soon have thought of throwing doubt upon the ten commandments as of denying that her own position made her of almost national importance. She was aware of all that; it was merely the reiteration of it which moved her to the faintest amount of impatience; but this she very soon repressed.

“Is Mrs. Stone to protect me?” she said.

“She is to be one of them, my dear. You know I don’t wish to do anything in secret, Lucy. I wish you to know all my arrangements. If you came to think afterward that your father had taken you by surprise I—should not like it; and now I have got as far as where you ought to live—listen, Lucy,” said the old man. The big document in the writing-case was evidently his one idea. His face brightened as he took it up and spread out the large leaves. As for Lucy, she sighed again very softly. How the will wearied her! But she was heroic, or stoical. She made no sort of stand against it; and after that one soft little protest of nature, went on with her knitting, and listened with great tranquillity. Her father read the paragraphs that he had been consulting Ford about, one by one; and Lucy listened as if he had been reading a newspaper. It awoke no warmer interest in her mind. She had heard so much of it that it did not affect her in any practical way; it seemed a harmless amusement for her father, and nothing more.

“Do you think you shall like going to Lady Randolph, Lucy?”

“How can I tell, papa? I don’t know Lady Randolph,” Lucy said.

“No; but that’s high life, my dear; and here’s humble life, Lucy. I want you to know both; and as for your marriage, you know—”

“You do not want me to marry,” said the sensible girl, “and I don’t think I wish it either, papa. But if I ever did, it would not be nice to have to go and ask all these people; and they never would agree. We might be quite sure of that.”

“Then you think I have been hard upon you? Always speak to me quite openly, Lucy. I don’t want to be hard upon you, my child—quite the other way.”

“Oh, it does not matter at all,” said Lucy, cheerfully, plying her knitting-needles. “I don’t think it is the least likely that I shall ever want to marry. As you have always told me, I shall have plenty to do, and there will be Jock,” she added, after a momentary pause.

“You have a great many prejudices about Jock,” her father said, testily: “what difference can he make? He has not so very much to do with you, and he will be in quite a different sphere.”

“Do you want me to have nobody belonging to me?” Lucy cried, with a sudden vivacity not without indignation in it, then subdued herself as suddenly. “It doesn’t at all matter,” she said.

“And you remember,” said her father almost humbly, “this is only till you are five-and-twenty. It is not for all eternity; you will have plenty of time to marry, or do whatever you please, after that.”

Lucy nodded and smiled once more. “I don’t think I shall want to marry,” she said; but while she spoke she was making a quiet calculation of quite a different character. “Jock is eight and I am seventeen,” she was saying within herself, “how old will Jock be when I am twenty-five?” It does not seem a difficult question; but she was not great in arithmetic, and it took her a moment or two to make it out. When she had succeeded her face brightened up. “Still young enough to be educated,” she added, always within herself, and this quite restored her patience and her cheerfulness.

“It will be very funny,” she said, “to see the rector and Mr. Williamson consulting together. I wonder how they will begin; I am sure Mr. Williamson will put on colored clothes to show how independent he is; and the doctor—the doctor will smile and rub his hands.”

“You forget,” said old Trevor, with a slight sharpness of tone, though he laughed, “that such things have been as that I should outlive the doctor. He’s younger than I am, to be sure, but I would not have you to calculate on my death before the doctor. It might be quite a different rector. It might be a young man that would, perhaps, put in claims to the heiress himself. But I’ll give you one piece of advice, Lucy, beforehand. Never marry a parson. They’re always in the way. Other kinds of men have their occupations; but a parson with a rich wife is always lounging about. Your mother used to say so; and she was a very sensible woman. She had an offer from one of the chapel ministers when she was young; but she would have nothing to say to him. A man in slippers, always indoors, was what she never could abide.”

“I don’t think the rector would be like that, papa,” said Lucy; “he doesn’t look as if he ever wore slippers at all—”

“Well, perhaps, it is the other kind I am thinking of,” said Mr. Trevor, who had not much acquaintance with the class which he called “church parsons,” though his liberality of mind was such that he had brought up Lucy partially, at least, as a church woman. His conduct, in this respect, was much the same as it was in reference to the distinctions of society. He wanted her to have her share in all—to be familiar alike with poverty and riches, and, as a kind of moral consequence, with church and chapel, too.

It was almost a disappointment to the old man that Lucy let the subject drop, and showed no further interest in it. He was a great deal more excited about her future life than she was. Lucy’s life was, indeed, to her father at once his great object and his pet plaything. It was his determination that it should be such a life as no one had ever lived before; a perfection of beneficence, wisdom, well-doing, and general superiority. He wanted to guard her against all perils, to hedge her round from every enemy. Unfortunately, he knew very little of the world, the dangers of which he was so intent on avoiding; but he was quite unaware of his own ignorance. He foresaw the well-known danger of fortune-hunters; but he did not perceive the impossibilities of the arrangement by which he had, he flattered himself, so carefully and cleverly guarded against them. In this respect Lucy had more insight than her father, in her gentle indifference. Her life was not a matter of theory to Lucy. It was not a thing at all to be molded and formed by any one, it was to-day and to-morrow. She listened to, without being affected by, all her father’s plans for her. They seemed a dream—a story to her, the future to which they referred was quite unreal in her eyes.

“We met Philip, papa,” she said, after a pause, with her usual tranquillity. “He is always very nice to Jock. He put him upon his shoulder to see the Punch. And he says he is coming to see you.”

“You met Philip,” said the old man, “and he is coming to see me? Well, let him come, Lucy. He is a rising man, and a fine gentleman—too fine for a homely old man like me. But we are not afraid of Philip. Let him come; and let us hope he will find his match when he comes here.”

“You do not like Philip, papa? I think he is the only person you are—not quite just to. What has he done? He is always very nice to Jock, and—” Lucy added, hastily, in a tone of conciliation, “to me, too.”

“Done?” said the old man, with a snarl in place of his usual chuckle. “He has done nothing but what is virtuous. He has doubled the school, and he sets up for being a gentleman. Don’t you know that I have the highest opinion of Philip? I always say so—the best of young men; and he calls me uncle, though he is only my wife’s distant cousin, which is very condescending of him. Not to approve of Philip would be to show myself a prejudiced old fool, and—” Mr. Trevor added, after a pause, showing his old teeth in yellow ferocity, not unmixed with humor, “that is exactly what I am.”

Lucy looked at him with her peaceful blue eyes. She shook her head in mild disapproval. “He is very nice to Jock—and to me, too,” she repeated, softly. But she made no further defense of her cousin. This was all she said.

CHAPTER VI.
PHILIP.

Philip Rainy was, as his relation had been obliged to avow, an excellent young man; there was nothing to be found fault with in his moral character, and everything to be applauded in his manners and habits. He had acquired his education in the most laborious way, at the cheapest possible rate, and he had used it, since he was in a condition to do so, in the most admirable manner. He was intelligent and amiable as well as prudent and ambitious, and though he meant to establish a reputation for himself, and a position among those who were considered best in Farafield, yet he never forgot his family, whom he had left behind; nor, though he did not think it necessary to brag that he had begun the world in the lowliest way, did he ever, when it was called for, shrink from an avowal of his origin, humble as that was. Why old Mr. Trevor should dislike him, it would be difficult to say, or rather, though it might be easy enough to divine the causes, it would be almost impossible to offer any justification of them. Old Trevor disliked the young man because—he was so altogether unexceptionable a young man. Every inducement that could have led an old man to patronize and encourage a young one existed here, and yet these very reasons why he should like Philip made his old relation dislike him. He was too good, and, alas, too successful. He had doubled the school in Kent’s Lane, which the old gentleman, distracted by other occupations, had brought down very low, indeed; and this was something which it was rather hard to forgive, though it was worthy of nothing but praise. And he was Lucy’s cousin, on the side of the house from which the fortune came, and perfectly suitable to Lucy in point of age, and in almost every way. How much trouble it would have avoided, how much ease and security it would have given, if Philip had been placed in Lucy’s way, and an attachment encouraged between them! It would have been the most natural thing in the world; it would have restored the fortune to the name, it would have enriched the family of the original possessor, it would have saved all the trouble of the will which old Trevor was elaborating with so much care. Therefore, it was that old Trevor detested Philip Rainy, or, at least, was so near detesting him that only Christian principle prevented that climax of feeling. As it was, with a distinct effort because the sentiment was wrong, the old man restrained his conscious dislike of the young one within the bounds of what he considered permissible hostility. But all he could do could not entirely control that fierce impulse of repugnance. He could not keep his voice from altering, his expression from changing, when Philip Rainy’s name was mentioned. Perhaps at the bottom of all his anxiety about Lucy’s fortune, and his desire to shape and control her actions, was an underlying dread that Lucy’s fate might be lying quite near, and might be decided at any moment before ever his precautions could come into effect.

Philip himself had no conception how far the dislike of his uncle—as he called old Trevor, without being in the least aware that this of itself was an offense—went. He did not even know that it was only to himself that the old man was so systematically ill-tempered. It was seldom he saw old Trevor in the society of other people, and he took it for granted, with much composure, that the sharpness of his gibes and the keenness of his criticisms were natural, and employed against the world in general as well as against himself. Being a young man determined to rise in the world, it was not to be supposed that he had not taken the whole question of his family connections into earnest consideration, or that he was entirely unmoved by the consciousness that within his reach, and accessible to him in many ways not possible for other men, was one of the greatest prizes imaginable, an heiress, whose soft little hand could raise him at once above all the chance of good or evil fortune, and confer upon him a position far beyond anything that was within his possibilities in any other way. On this latter point, however, he was not at all clear; for Philip was young, and had not learned to know these inexorable limits which hem in possibility. He thought he could do a great many things by his unaided powers which he would have easily seen to be impossible for any one else. He believed in occasions arising which would give scope to his talents, and show the world what manner of man it was which the irony of fate confined to the humble occupation of a school-master in a little country town; and he entertained no doubt that when the occasion came he would show himself worthy of it. Therefore, he was not sure that Lucy’s fortune could do much more for him than he could do for himself; but he was too sensible to ignore the difference it would make in his start, the great assistance it would be in his career. It would give him an advantage of ten years, he said to himself, in the musings of that self-confidence which was so determined and arrogant, yet so simple; a difference of ten years—that stands for a great deal in a man’s life. To attain that at thirty which in ordinary circumstances you would only attain at forty, is an advantage which is worthy many sacrifices; but yet, at the same time, if you are sure of attaining at forty, or by good luck at thirty-nine, the good fortune on which your mind is set, it is not perhaps worth your while to make a very serious sacrifice of your self-esteem or pride merely for the sake of saving these ten years. This was why Philip maintained with ease so dignified and worthy a position in respect to his heiress-cousin. She would make a difference of ten years—but that was all; and besides being a young man determined to get on in the world, he was a young man who gave himself credit for fine feelings, and independence of mind, and generosity of sentiment. He could not, at this early stage of his existence, have come to a mercenary decision, and made up his mind to marry for money. He did not see any necessity for it; he felt quite able to encounter fate in his own person; therefore, though he did not refuse to acknowledge that it would be a very good thing to marry an heiress, and very pleasant if the woman with whom he fell in love should belong to that class, he had not proposed to himself the idea either of trying to fall in love with Lucy or attempting to secure her affections to himself. The idea of her hovered before his mind as a possibility—but there were many other possibilities hovering before Philip, and some more enticing, more attractive, than any heiress. Therefore he did not spoil his own prospects by perpetual visits, or by paying her anything that could be called “attention” in the phraseology of the drawing-room. His relations with her were no more than cousinly; he was very “nice;” but then he was even more “nice” to little Jock, who was not his relation at all, than to Lucy. It was part of his admirable character that he was fond of children, and always good to them, so that no suspicion could possibly attach to the very moderate amount of intercourse which was conducted on so reasonable a footing. But the more it was reasonable, the more it was cousinly, the more did old Trevor dislike his child’s relation; he had not the slightest ground for fault-finding, therefore his secret wrath was nursed in secret, and grew and increased. It was all he could do to receive Philip with civility when he came. He came in after dinner in a costume carefully adapted to please, or at least to disarm all objections, a compromise between morning and evening dress; he made judicious inquiries after the old man’s health, not too much, as if there was anything special in his solicitude, but as much as mingled politeness and family affection required.

“I hope you are standing the cold pretty well, sir,” he said; “spring is always so trying. I can bear the winter better myself; at all events, one does not expect anything better in December, and one makes up one’s mind to it.”

“At your age,” said old Trevor, “it was all the same to me, December or July; I liked the one as much as the other. But I think we might find something better to talk of than the weather; every idiot does that.”

“That is true,” said the young man, “it is always the first topic among English people. With our uncertain climate—”

“I never was out, of England, for my part,” the old man interrupted him sharply. “English climate is the only climate I know anything about. I don’t pretend to be superior to it, like you folks that talk of Italy and so forth. What have I got to do with Italy? It may be warmer, but warm weather never agreed with me.”

“I have never been out of England, either,” said the young man, with that persistence in the soft word that turns away wrath, which is of all things in the world the most provoking to irritable people; and then he changed the subject gently, but not to his own advantage. “I thought you would like to hear, uncle, how well everything is going on in Kent’s Lane. I am thinking of an assistant, the boys are getting beyond my management; indeed, if things go on as they are doing, I shall soon have enough to do managing, without teaching at all. I have heard of a very nice fellow, a University man. Don’t you think that, on the whole, would be an advantage? people think so much more nowadays—for the mere teaching, you know, only for the teaching—of a man with a degree.”

“A man with a fiddlestick!” said old Trevor. “The question is, are you going into competition with Eton and Harrow, Mr. Philip Rainy, or are you the master of a commercial academy, that’s the question. The man that founded that establishment hadn’t got a degree, no, nor would have accepted one if they had gone on their knees to him. He knew his place, and the sort of thing that was expected from him. Oh, surely, get your man with a degree! or go and buy a degree for yourself (it’s a matter of fees more than anything else, I have always heard), and starve when you have got it. But I’d like you to hand over Kent’s Lane first to somebody that will carry it on as it used to be.”

“I beg your pardon with all my heart, uncle,” cried the young man. “I have not the least intention of abandoning Kent’s Lane. It’s my sheet-anchor, all I have in the world; and I would not alter the character you stamped upon it for any inducement. The only thing is, that so much more attention is paid to the classics nowadays—”

“Curse nowadays, sir!” cried old Trevor, his countenance glowing with anger. Then he pulled himself up, and recollected that such language was far from becoming to his age and dignity, not to speak of his Christian principles. “I shouldn’t have said that,” he added, in a subdued tone; “I don’t want to curse anything. Still I don’t know what the times are coming to with all these absurd novelties. The classics” (he had been boasting of his Latin an hour before) “for a set of shop-keepers’ sons that want to know how to add up their fathers’ books! It’s folly and nonsense, that’s what it is. Even if you could do it, what’s the advantage of snipping all classes out on the same pattern? It’s a great deal better to have a little difference. Women, too—you’d clip them all out like images in paper, the same shape as men. It’s a pity,” he added, grimly, “that your classics and your degrees don’t do more for those that have got them. Many an M. A. I’ve seen in my time tacked to the names of the biggest fools I’ve ever known.”

“Still it is not necessary to be a big fool, sir, because you are an M. A.,” said Philip, always mildly, but with a sigh. “It is a great advantage to a man; I wish I had it. I know what you will say, better men than I have not had it; but just because I am not a better man—”

For the first time old Trevor broke into his habitual chuckle.

“Give him some tea, Lucy,” he said. “I suppose you’re one of the fashionable kind, and have your dinner when I used to have my supper. That’s not the way to thrive, my lad.”

“What does it matter whether you call it dinner or supper, sir?” said Philip; “and, pardon me, don’t you do the same?”

“It makes a deal of difference,” said the old man. “Parents like to hear that you have your tea at six o’clock, and your supper at nine, like themselves. They don’t like you to give yourself airs, as if you were better than they are. You’re a clever fellow, Philip Rainy, and you think you are getting on like a house on fire. But you’re a fool all the same.”

“Papa, I wish you would not be so uncivil,” said Lucy, who had yet taken no part in their talk.

“I tell you he’s a fool all the same. I kept Kent’s Lane a-going for thirty years, and I ought to know. I’ve taught the best men in the town. Oxford fellows, and Cambridge fellows, and all sorts, have come to me for their mathematics, though I never had a degree; and I eat my dinner at two, and my tea at six as regular as clock-work all the time. That’s the way to do, if you mean to keep it up all your life, and lay by a little money, and leave the place to your son after you. If Jock had been older that’s what I should have made him do; that is the way to succeed in Kent’s Lane.”

There was a little pause after this, for Philip was a little angry too, and had not command for the moment of that soft word of which he made so determined a use; and at the same time he was resolved not to quarrel with Lucy’s father. He said, after a while, in as easy a tone as he could assume:

“I wish you would let me have Jock. He is old enough for school now, and whatever you want to do with him I could always begin his education; of course, you will give him every advantage—”

“I will give him as good as I had myself, Philip, and as you had. Do you think I am going to take Lucy’s money for that child? Not a penny! He shall be bred up according to his own rank in life; and by the time he’s a man, you’ll have grown too grand for the old place, and you can hand it over to him.”

Philip opened his eyes in spite of himself.

“Then Lucy will be a great lady,” he said, half laughing, “and her brother a little school-master in Kent’s Lane.”

Lucy, who was standing behind her father at the moment, began to make the most energetic signs of dissent. She made her mouth into a puckered circle of inarticulate “No-os,” and shook her head with vehement contradiction. Just below, and all unconscious of this pantomime, the old man grinned upon his visitor, delighted with the opportunity at once of declaring his intentions, and of inflicting a salutary snub.

“That is exactly what I intend,” he said, “you have hit it. Even if it hadn’t been just, it would have been a fine thing to do as an example; but it is just as well. Is a fine lady any better than a poor school-master? Not a bit! Each one in the rank of life that is appointed, and one as good as another; that’s always been my principle. I wouldn’t have stepped out of my rank of life, or the habits of my rank of life, not if you had given me thousands for it; not, I promise you,” cried old Trevor, with a snarl, “for the sake of being asked to dinner here and there, as some folks are; but being in my own rank of life I thought myself as good as the king; and that’s why Lucy shall be a great lady, and her brother a little school-master, whether or not he’s in Kent’s Lane.”

“But he shall not be so, papa, if I can help it,” Lucy said.

“You won’t be able to help it, my pet,” said her father, relapsing Into a chuckle, “not you, nor any one else; that’s one thing of which I can make sure.”

The two young people looked at each other over his old head. They made no telegraphic signs this time. Philip was for the moment overawed by the old man’s determination, while Lucy, the most dutiful of daughters, was mute, in a womanly confidence of somehow or other finding a way to balk him. She had not in the least realized how life was to be bound and limited by the imperious will of the father who grudged her nothing. But Lucy accepted it all quite tranquilly, whatever it might be—except this. When she went with her cousin to the door, she confided to him the one exception to her purposes of obedience.

“Papa does not think what he is saying; I never believe him when he talks like that. I to be rich and Jock poor! He only says it for fun, Philip, don’t you think?”

“It does not look much like fun,” Philip said, with a rueful shake of his head.

“Well! but old people—old people are very strange; they think a thing is a joke that does not seem to us at all like a joke. I will do all that papa wishes, but not about Jock.”

“And I hope you won’t let him persuade you to think,” said Philip, lingering with her hand in his to say good-night, “that I am neglecting my work, or giving myself airs, or—”

“Oh, that is only his fun,” said Lucy, nodding her head to him with a pleasant smile as he went out into the night.

She was not pretty, he thought, as he walked away, but her face was very soft and round and pleasant; her blue eyes very steady and peaceful, with a calmness in them, which, in its way, represented power. Philip, who was, though so steady, somewhat excitable, and apt to be fretted and worried, felt that the repose in her was consolatory and soothing. She would be good to come home to after a man had been baited and bullied in the world. He had thought her an insignificant little girl, but to-night he was not so sure that she was insignificant, and Philip did not know anything, at all about the will and its iron rod.

CHAPTER VII.
THE WHITE HOUSE.

The life of Lucy Trevor, at this period, was divided between two worlds, very dissimilar in constitution. The odd household over which her father’s will and pleasure was paramount, though exercised through the medium of Mrs. Ford, and in which so many out-of-the-way subjects were continually being discussed, all with some personal reference to the old man and his experiences and crotchety principles of action, occupied one part of her time and thoughts: but the rest of her belonged to another sphere—to the orderly circle of studies and amusements of which the central figure was Mrs. Stone, and the scene the White House, a large irregular low building on the edge of the common, which was within sight of Mr. Trevor’s windows in the Terrace, and had appeared, through all the mist and fog of those wintery days, with a kind of halo round its whiteness like that of a rainy and melancholy old moon, tumbled from its high place to the low levels of a damp and flat country. Mrs. Stone’s was known far and wide as the best school for a hundred miles round, the best as far as education was concerned, and also the most exclusive and aristocratic. Lucy Trevor was the only girl in Farafield who was received as a day-pupil. Efforts had been made by people of the highest local standing to procure the admission of other girls of well-known families in the town, but in vain. And why Mrs. Stone had taken Lucy, who was nobody, who was only old John Trevor’s daughter, was a mystery to her best friends. She had offended a great many of the townspeople, but she had flattered the local aristocracy, the county people, by her exclusiveness; and she offended both by the sudden relaxation of her rule on behalf of Lucy. The rector’s daughter would have been a thousand times more eligible, or even Emmy Rushton, whose mother had knocked at those jealous doors in vain for years together; and why should she have taken Lucy Trevor, old John’s daughter, who was nobody, who had not the faintest pretension to gentility? Lady Langton drove in, as a kind of lofty deputation and representative of the other parents who had daughters at Mrs. Stone’s school, to remonstrate with her, and procure the expulsion of the intruder; but Mrs. Stone was equal to the occasion. She did not hesitate to say to the countess, “Your ladyship is at liberty to remove Lady Maud whenever you please. I dispense with the three months’ notice.”

It was this speech which established Mrs. Stone’s position far more than her excellence in professional ways. A woman who dared to look a countess in the face, and make such a suggestion, was too wonderful a person to be contemplated save with respect and awe. Lady Langton herself withdrew, abashed and confounded, protesting that to take Maud a way was the last idea in her mind. And Mrs. Stone’s empire was thus established. The incident made a great impression on the county generally; and it nearly threw into a nervous fever the other mistress, conjointly with Mrs. Stone, of the White House, her sister Miss Southwood, called, as a matter of course, Southernwood by the girls, who stood by aghast, and heard her say, “I dispense with the three months’ notice:” and expected nothing less than that the sky should fall, and the walls crumble in round them. Miss Southwood liked to think afterward that it was her own deprecating glances, her look of horror and dismay, and, above all, the cup of exquisite tea which she offered Lady Langton as she waited for her carriage, which put everything straight; but all her civilities would never have established that moral ascendency which her sister’s uncompromising defiance secured.

Miss Southwood was the elder of the two. She was forty-five or thereabouts, and she was old-fashioned. Whether it was by calculation, to make a claim of originality for herself, such as it was, or simply because she thought that style becoming to her, nobody knew; but she dressed in the fashions which had been current in her youth, and never changed. She wore her hair in a knot fastened by a high comb behind, and with little ringlets drooping on either cheek; and amid the long and sweeping garments of the present era, wore a full plain skirt which did not touch the ground, and gigot sleeves. In this dress she went about the house softly and briskly, without the whistling and rustling of people in long trains. She was a very mild person in comparison with her high-spirited and despotic sister; but yet was gifted with a gentle obstinacy, and seldom permitted any argument to beguile her from her own way. She had, nominally, the same power in the house as Mrs. Stone, and it was partly her money which was put in peril by her sister’s audacity; but the elder had always been faithful to the younger, and though she might grumble, never failed to make common cause with her, even in her most heroic measures. As for Lucy Trevor, though she shook her head, she submitted, feeling that to suffer on behalf of an heiress was a pain from which the worst sting was taken out; for it was not to be supposed that a girl so rich could allow her school-mistress to come to harm on her account. Mrs. Stone was far more imposing in appearance. She was full five years younger, and she was not old-fashioned. She was tall, with a commanding figure, and her dresses were handsome as herself, made by an artiste in town, not by the bungling hands of the trade in Farafield, of rich texture and the most fashionable cut. She was a woman of speculative and theoretical mind, believing strongly in “influence,” and very anxious to exercise it when an opportunity occurred. She had her ideas, as Mr. Trevor had, of what might be made of an heiress; and it seemed to Mrs. Stone that there was no class in the world upon which “influence” might tell more, or be more beneficially exercised. Her ideas on this subject laid her open to various injurious suppositions. Thus, when she took Lady Maud Langton into her bosom, as it were—moved by a brilliant hope of influence to be exercised on society itself by means of a very pretty and popular young woman of fashion—vulgar by-standers accused Mrs. Stone of tuft-hunting, and of paying special honor to the girl who was the daughter of an earl out of mere love of a title, an altogether unworthy representation of her real motive. And her sudden stand on behalf of Lucy took the world by surprise. They could not fathom her meaning; that she should have defied the countess, whom up to this time she had been supposed to worship with a servile adulation, on account of a little bit of a girl of no particular importance, was incomprehensible. It was known in Farafield that Lucy had a fortune, but it was not known how great that fortune was, and after much groping among the motives possible to Mrs. Stone in the circumstances, the country-town gossips had come to the conclusion that she aspired to a marriage with old John Trevor, and an appropriation to herself of all his wealth. This supplied a sufficient reason even for a breach with the countess. To be asked to Langdale, which was the finest thing that could happen to her in connection with Lady Maud, was, though gratifying, not to be compared with the possibility of marrying a rich man in her own person, and becoming one of the chief ladies of Farafield. This was how it was accounted for by that chorus of spectators who call themselves society, and Miss Southwood herself entertained, against her will, the same opinion. This suggestion seemed to make everything clear.

A few days after that on which Mr. Trevor read to Ford the last paragraph which he had added to his will, Lucy tapped at the door of Mrs. Stone’s private parlor with her father’s message. The ladies were seated together in their private sanctuary, resting from their labors. It was a seclusion never invaded by the pupils except on account of some important commission from a parent, or to ask advice, or by order of its sovereigns. Lucy came in with the little old-fashioned courtesy which Mrs. Stone insisted upon, and made her request.

“If you would come to tea to-morrow night. Papa is very sorry, but he bids me say he thinks you know that he can not come to you.”

“How is Mr. Trevor, Lucy?”

Miss Southwood, who was looking at her sister anxiously, thought she asked this question by way of gaining time. Could he have sent for her in order to propose to her, the anxious sister thought. What a very curious way of proceeding! But a rich old man, with one foot in the grave, could not be expected to act like other men.

“He is—just as he always is; very busy, always writing; but he can not go out, and if you would be so kind—”

“Oh, yes, I will be so kind,” said Mrs. Stone, with a smile; “it is not the first time, Lucy. Is he going to complain of you, or to tell me of something he wants for you?”

“I think,” said Lucy, “it is about the will.”

“Dear me!” Miss Southwood cried. “What can you have to do, Maria, with Mr. Trevor’s will?”

Mrs. Stone smiled again.

“He goes on with it, then, as much as ever?” she said.

“Oh, yes, almost more than ever; it gives him a great deal of occupation,” said Lucy, with a grave face. There were some things that she had it in her heart to say on this subject; she looked at the school-mistress anxiously, not knowing if she might trust her, and then was silent, fearing to open her mind to any one on the subject of Jock.

“Poor child! he is putting a great burden upon you at your age; the management of a fortune is too much for a girl; but, Lucy, you will always know where to find advice and help so far as I can give it. You must never hesitate to come to me, whatever happens,” Mrs. Stone said.

“Thank you,” said Lucy, in her tranquil way. She had read something in the school-mistress’s face, she could not have told what, which sealed her lips in respect to Jock.

“Dear me!” cried Miss Southwood again, “you are both very mysterious; I should think nothing was easier than to manage a fortune. It is when one has no fortune that life is difficult to manage,” she said, with a sigh.

“The wonder is,” said Mrs. Stone, calmly ignoring her sister’s interruption, “that your father does not carry out some of his own views, Lucy, instead of leaving everything to you. It would be in your favor if he would take a larger house, and get together an establishment more befitting your prospects; I think I shall suggest this to him. He has always been very civil in listening to my suggestions. A proper establishment, all set in order in his life-time, would be a great matter for you.”

“But, Maria, Maria!” cried Miss Southwood, “think, for Heaven’s sake, what you are doing; think what people will say. That you should suggest such a thing would never do.”

Mrs. Stone turned round and looked at her with scathing indifference.

“What do people say?” she asked, and went on without waiting for an answer. “You ought to be living as becomes your future position,” she said; “the associations you will form at present, and the habits you are acquiring, can not be good for you. Thank Heaven you are here, my dear child, in a place which, however homely, is intended as a place of training for girls who have to occupy high positions.”

“I don’t think it will matter for me,” said Lucy; “I shall never be a great lady, I shall only be rich. No one will expect so very much from me.”

“They will expect a great deal, and I hope my pupil will do me credit,” said Mrs. Stone; and she rose up and kissed Lucy with a little enthusiasm. “I agree with your father, I think there is a great deal in you, Lucy; but I don’t agree with him as to the best means of bringing it out. He thinks that you should be plunged into life all of a sudden, and a great call made upon you; but I believe in education; we shall soon see who is right.”

“Oh, I hope not,” cried Lucy, “I hope not; for before you can know anything about it papa will have to be—”

“Not if he takes my way, Lucy; he ought to take Holmwood, that pretty house near Sir Thomas Randolph’s, and give you a beginning; and I think he ought to do some of the things in his will which he is talking of leaving upon you; I will speak to him to-morrow night. Yes; you can say I will come; but do not think too much of these serious matters; go and amuse yourself with your companions, my dear.”

“Maria,” said Miss Southwood, when the door closed, “you think yourself a great deal wiser than I am, but you must hear what I have to say. If you go and advise that old man to take Holmwood and set up an establishment, there will be but one thing that anybody can think. If you care anything for the opinion of the world, or for my opinion, for Heaven’s sake don’t do it, don’t do it! a woman in your position has need to be so careful. Of course, it stands to reason that is what everybody will think.”

“What is what everybody—? Your style in conversation is very careless,” said Mrs. Stone, with great indifference. But her counselor would not be put down.

“I will tell you exactly what will be thought,” she said, solemnly. “What is the common talk already? that you mean to marry that old man. Why did you take up the girl, risking your whole connection—you that have always been so exclusive—a girl of no family at all! You must have had a motive—no one ever acts without a motive; and perhaps if he is very rich, and you could be sure of carrying it out— But how do we know that he is really very rich? and most likely you will not be able to carry it out; and at your age to risk your reputation—oh, I don’t mean in any wrong way—but to risk your character for sense and good taste, and all that! Consider for one moment, consider, Maria, what the ‘parents’ would say, what the parents would have a right to say!”

“If you think that I am to be kept in order by a threat of what ‘parents’ will think!” said Mrs. Stone. “Do you suppose I will ever give in to parents? Why, it would be our destruction. But make your mind easy, I don’t mean to marry old Trevor, and he does not mean to ask me. Listen! you don’t know what you are talking about. That girl whom you think nothing of, that girl you are always taunting me about—and she is a very nice girl, as simple as a daisy and as true— Listen, Ellen! she will be the greatest heiress in England one of these days.”

Miss Southwood stood and listened with all her soul, her eyes and her mouth opening wider and wider, her imagination set suddenly on fire, for she had an imagination, and that of a most practical kind. The greatness of Lucy’s fortune had never been so plainly set before her. She was so much taken by surprise that she spoke with a gasp, as if all her breath and energy were thrown into the question.

“And what do you mean to do?”

“I mean to manage her, if I can, for her own good, and for the good of her fellow-creatures,” cried Mrs. Stone, excited too. “Power, that is what I have always wanted. I know I can use it well, and Lucy is a good girl, good to the bottom of her heart. She will want to do good with her money; and money, money is power.”

Miss Southwood listened, but she did not share her sister’s enthusiasm. Her countenance fell into shades of disapproval and impatience. She shook her head.

“You were always so high-flown,” she said. “I never saw anything come of these heiresses. Manage her! you ought to know by this time girls are not such easy things to manage. But there is a much better thing you can do—marry her! and that will be good for her and us.”

Mrs. Stone looked at her sister with a smile which was somewhat supercilious.

“That is, of course, your first idea; and how, if I may ask, would such an expedient be good for us? if I thought of good for us—which is a thing that never entered my thoughts—”

“Because you have no family affection, Maria. I have always said it of you. You think of the girl more than of your own relations. How is it possible,” asked Miss Southwood, severely, “that you could have any hand in the disposal of an heiress and not think of Frank?”

CHAPTER VIII.
EXPLANATIONS.

Lucy went home a little impressed by what Mrs. Stone had said. It had never occurred to her before to think of anything but her father’s will and pleasure in the matter, or to suppose that she had anything to do but to acquiesce in his arrangements; but when the idea was put into her head, it commended itself to her reasonable mind. If he were, at least, to begin to do some of the things which he had by his will commanded her to do, what an ease and comfort it would be! and she could not but think that it would be a relief to himself, as well as for her, could he be made, as Mrs. Stone suggested, to see it in this way. In the first place, it would obviate on his part all necessity for dying, which, at present, was the initial requirement, the one thing needful, before any of his regulations could be carried out. Why should he die? She could not but perceive, as she thought over the whole subject dispassionately, according to her nature, that from his own point of view it would be a mistake if his life were prolonged. The whole scheme was based upon his death. So long as he did not die it was a mere imagination. And why should this be? far better to get over this fundamental necessity by changing the construction of his plan altogether, and begin to carry out his wishes himself. When they were sitting together in the afternoon, which was wet and dull, the idea took a stronger hold upon her, and it was when Mr. Trevor was actually writing down something new that had occurred to him, that her thoughts came the length of speech. She looked up from her knitting, and he stopped, with the pen in his hand, and, looking round upon her, listened with a smile to what Lucy might have to say.

“Why should you take all this trouble, papa?” she said, suddenly. “I have been thinking; and this is what I feel sure of, that it should all be altered. You are not ill, or likely to die. Instead of writing out all these orders for me, would it not be much better if you would put that paper aside and do the things you have put into it yourself?”

He looked at her over the top of his spectacles with an air of consternation.

“Do the things myself! what things?” he said, then paused and pushed his spectacles up on his forehead, and gazed at her almost fiercely with his small keen eyes. “That paper!” he repeated; “do you mean the will, my will, Lucy?” The tone in which he spoke was as if it had been the British Constitution which Lucy proposed to set aside.

“Yes,” she said. “You see, papa, I shall be very young, I shall not have very much sense.”

“You have a great deal of sense, Lucy,” he said, mollified, “far more than most girls. Providence has made you for the work you have got to do.”

“But, papa,” she said, “I shall be very young; it will be very hard upon me to decide what is to be done with all that money, and to give and not to give. It will be very hard. How should I know which are the right people? I should either want to give to everybody or to nobody. I should throw it away, or I should be too frightened to make any use of it at all.”

“That will be impossible,” said old Trevor, with a nod of satisfaction; “I have taken precautions about that.”

“Then I should give foolishly, papa.”

“Very likely, my dear, very likely; every one has to pay for his own experience. It is a very dear commodity, Lucy; I can’t give you mine, you must get it for yourself, and it has always, always to be paid for. There is no question about that.”

“But, papa, would it not be a great deal better—you who have this experience, who have paid for it and got it—instead of living quietly here as if you were nobody, to do it all yourself?”

The old man laughed.

“There you have hit it, Lucy,” he said, “there you have hit it, my dear. I live quietly, as if I were nobody—and I am nobody—that is exactly the state of affairs.”

“But,” she cried, with great surprise and indignation, “if you mean nobody in family, then neither am I, but the money, the money is all yours to do with it whatever you please.”

Once more he laughed, and chuckled, and lost his breath, and coughed before he could recover it again; and whether it was the laughing, or the coughing, or something else, Lucy could not tell, but the water stood in his eyes.

“You are mistaken, Lucy, you are mistaken,” he said. “You must understand the truth, my dear; neither am I any one to speak of, nor is the money mine. I have made a little in my life—oh, very little—a poor school-master’s earnings—what are they, nothing to make a fuss about. I’ve put my little savings away for Jock, you know that. A few thousand pounds, just as much as will give him a start in the world, if it is well taken care of.”

“Papa, you ought to give Jock the half,” said Lucy reproachfully; “it is not fair that he should have nothing, and that all should come to me.”

“Listen to her!” said the old man; “first telling me to spend it myself, and then to give half to the boy. Nothing of the sort, Lucy; I know what justice is, and I mean to do it. Do you think I could take poor Lucilla’s money to make that brat a gentleman? Why, it’s a kind of insult to her, poor thing, that he’s there at all. I don’t say a word against his mother, Lucy, but I always felt I never ought to have married her. I was not like a young man, I was middle-aged even before I married poor Lucilla, and I had no business to have the other; it was a mistake, it was an affront to your poor mother. People say that you show how happy you’ve been with the first when you get a second, but I don’t go in with that. When I think of facing these two women and not knowing which I belong to, I— I don’t like it, Lucy. Lucilla was always very considerate, and made great allowances, but there are things a woman can’t be expected to put up with, and I don’t like the thought.”