CHAPTER IV.SISTER AND BROTHER.

Fromthe 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 unableto 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 fromits 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. “Likehim; 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 dayyou shall have one,” said his sister in her tranquil voice. “I will buy you one when I am rich.”

“Are yousoongoing 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, buten passanthe 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 shopsagain? 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 wouldyoudo? 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: “sheknows 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 whatshouldyou 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 themostSunday,” 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 ayoung 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 thecousinship 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.

Thechildren, 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 atthe 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 foryouto 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 greatones, 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 oldteeth 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.

Philip Rainywas, 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 naturalthing 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 worthyof 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 hecould 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 isjustas 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.

Thelife 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 thecountess, “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, andgigotsleeves. 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 onbehalf 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 anartistein 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 doorof 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 afortune. 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. Thatyoushould 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, “youthink 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 reasonthatis what everybody will think.”

“Whatis 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 anywrongway—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!”


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