But just as she said this, Miss Mildmay's last words—the good lady had rather an emphatic way of speaking—rang out clearly: 'I have never heard certainly that they were of the Elvedon family.'

'That's just it,' said Frances, and by this time Lady Myrtle's attention was fully caught. 'Of course I don't mean to contradict you, Aunt Alison, but I do know they're the same family, and so they are relations of Lady Myrtle's. And it's not only that I like them. I'm so very sorry for them, so very sorry. They are all so good, and they have so very, very many troubles,' and here the irrepressible tears rose to poor Frances's eyes, and she turned her head away abruptly.

Lady Myrtle glanced at her and then at Jacinth. Jacinth's face was quiet and very grave.

'You are a very loyal friend, I see, Frances,' said the old lady; and rather to every one's surprise the words were accompanied by a little smile, and then she turned to Jacinth.

'I don't think you have ever named these—these Harpers—to me, have you, my dear?' she asked.

Jacinth looked up at once.

'No,' she said; 'I have not, and I have refrained from doing so on purpose. I—I did not think it concerned me, and you might not have liked it. I—I should be so sorry to vex you.'

The appeal in her eyes touched Lady Myrtle more than Frances's tears. And in what she said, so far as it went, Jacinth was sincere. She did shrink from any possible allusion that could annoy or upset her kind friend; and the selfish motives underlying the prejudice, almost amounting to positive dislike, which she had allowed to take root in her feelings to the Harpers, she blinded herself to, or called by some other name.

Lady Myrtle was silent, but there was no resentment in her face. She only looked sad—very, very sad.

'You know these girls very much less well than Frances did,' said Miss Mildmay, whose sympathies were just now all with Jacinth. 'You see,' she went on, turning to her hostess, 'Frances has been in the habit of spending holiday afternoons at school—sometimes when you had kindly invited Jacinth here, on a Saturday, for instance.'

Lady Myrtle started a little. Her thoughts had been far away. She leaned forward and took hold of Jacinth's hand—Jacinth was sitting next to her, and the servants had left the room—and patted it affectionately.

'Of course. I know Jacinth is very, very thoughtful for me,' she said. 'And I see that you understand it, my dear Miss Mildmay. Not that I am vexed with little Frances. I like children to be children, and of all things I like a loyal friend.'

Then she at once and with evident intention, which the others were quick to read, changed the subject of conversation. On the whole, vexed though she was with Frances's persistence—'self-willed obstinacy' as she called it to herself—Jacinth felt that the dreaded crisis had passed off better than might have been expected, and in some things it was a relief. Things were on a clearer basis now.

'It was bound to come, I suppose,' she said to herself. 'Mamma seems almost as impulsive and quixotic as Frances—quite bewitched by these people. But at worst there's nothing more to tell now, and Lady Myrtle appreciates my feelings if no one else does.'

Frances, on her side, though her heart was still beating tumultuously, felt glad that she had had the courage and opportunity to say what she had. But for her dread of a private reprimand from Jacinth afterwards, the little girl would on the whole have had a somewhat lightened heart about her friends. For, as she said to herself, 'Lady Myrtle had certainly not seemed angry.'

Strange to say, the anticipated reproof from Jacinth never came. It was true there was not much time for any private talk between the sisters, for Frances and Eugene went back to Market Square Place that same afternoon with their aunt. But even when, a week later, Jacinth herself rejoined them there a day or two before the reopening of Ivy Lodge school, there was no mention of the Harpers, and no allusion to what had passed at luncheon the day of Miss Mildmay's visit to Robin Redbreast.

'Can it be that Lady Myrtle is really going to be kind to them, and that she told Jacinth not to be vexed with me?' thought sanguine little Frances. She would have felt less hopeful had she known that not one word had passed between her sister and the old lady on the subject of her unknown relations. And Jacinth had simply made up her mind to think no more about them; her conscience now being, or so at least she told herself, completely at rest—the matter entirely out of her hands.

It was the easier to carry out this resolution that Bessie and Margaret's places were vacant, though no one seemed very clearly to understand why they had not returned, and the Misses Scarlett expressed the heartiest regret that they had not done so. Honor Falmouth too had left, but this had been known by anticipation to her companions for some time. And in the little world of a school, as in the bigger world outside, it is not for long that the circles in the waters of daily life mark the spot of any disappearance; it has to be so, and does not necessarily imply either heartlessness or caprice. We are limited as to our powers in all directions—the more marvellous that somewhere, invisible, unsuspected, our innermost self lives on. And far down, below the surface restlessness and change, may we not hope that we shall find again the fibres of loving friendships and pure affections whose roots were deep and true, though at times it may seem that like other precious and beautiful things they were but as a dream?

Frances missed her friends sadly, the more so that not knowing their exact address, and half afraid also to do such a thing on her own responsibility, she could not write to them. But nothing depressed Frances now for very long or very deeply. She had found a panacea. All would be right soon, 'when mamma comes home.'



CHAPTER XIII.

MAMMA.

At Thetford the weeks till Easter—it came in the middle of April that year—passed quickly. It is true that every morning, when Frances scored out one of the long row of little lines she had made to represent the days till that of her mother's arrival, she could not repress a sigh at the number yet remaining. But still the time, even for her, passed quickly. For she was busy—working more steadily at her lessons than ever before, in the hope of having satisfactory progress to show—and full of the happiest anticipations. Morning and night the faithful, simple-hearted girl added to her other petitions the special one that things might be so over-ruled as to prevent the necessity of further separation.

'It can't be wrong to ask it,' she said to herself, 'for God made fathers and mothers and children to be together. It's something wrong somewhere when they can't be. And I've got a feeling that it is going to be like that for us now. I don't care a bit where we live—that place in the north or anywhere—if only we're with them.'

Jacinth, too, on the whole was happy in her own way. Personally, perhaps, she longed less for her mother's presence and sympathy than Frances did, for she was by nature more self-sufficing. And when one scarcely knows till one is fifteen or sixteen what it is to have a mother and a real home of one's own, small wonder if the inestimable blessings of such possessions are barely realised. Then, too, Jacinth's frequent visits to Lady Myrtle, and the old lady's ever-increasing affection for and interest in her had almost filled up the voids the girl had at first felt bitterly enough in her new life. She would in many ways have been quite content for things to go on as they were for a year or two. And if she built castles in the air, it must be allowed that Lady Myrtle was to a great extent responsible for their construction.

'I can scarcely fancy feeling as if mamma were more of a mother to me than you seem now,' she said one day to her old friend.

'Nay,' Lady Myrtle replied, 'I must represent a grandmother. You really do not know what a mother feels like, dear child.'

'Well,' Jacinth went on, 'perhaps that's it. But somehow I think mamma will seem more a sort of elder sister to me. And I hope she will take it that way. We shall get on better if she does. I—I'm afraid I shouldn't be very good about giving in. You see I've never had to do it much.'

She smiled a little as she made the confession.

'I can scarcely imagine you anything but docile, my dear,' said Lady Myrtle; 'but then, of course, I know I have not seen you really tested. I fancy, however, there will be a mingling of the elder-sisterly feeling in your relations to your mother, and I hope there will be. I think she has a high opinion of your good sense and judgment, and I don't expect that she will have any cause to change her opinion.'

Jacinth sat silent for a moment or two. She seemed to be thinking deeply; her eyes were fixed on the fire, where the wooden logs were throwing out brilliant gleams of varying colours, reflected on the bright brasses of the grate and fender.

'How pretty everything here always is!' she said at last. 'Even to the burning wood. Look, Lady Myrtle, it is blue and purple and even green.'

'They are old ship logs,' her friend replied. 'It is the brine in them that makes the colours.'

'Oh dear,' said Jacinth again with a little sigh, 'how I should love a pretty home. Lady Myrtle, I am afraid you will be shocked at me, but do you know I sometimes almost feel I would rather papa and mamma went back to India next year than that we should have to go to live at that horrible dingy Barmettle.'

Lady Myrtle was not shocked. Still, she was too unselfish by nature herself not to be quick to check any symptoms of an opposite character in one she really cared for, glad though she was to have Jacinth's full confidence.

'I think you would bear such a trial as that, readily and cheerfully, if it were for your father and mother's good,' she said. 'And after all, where we live is not of the importance that I daresay it seems to you. Some of the truly happiest people I have ever known have been so in spite of the most uncongenial surroundings you can imagine.'

'I'm not as good as that,' said Jacinth in a melancholy voice. 'I can't bear ugly, messy places; above all, messy, untidy places make me perfectly cross and miserable.'

Lady Myrtle could not help laughing a little at her tragic tone.

'I don't see that, even if you had to live at Barmettle, your home need be ugly and untidy,' she said.

'I don't know. I've been thinking a good deal about it,' Jacinth replied. 'You see, mamma will have been so long in India that she will have got out of English ways. She must be accustomed to lots of servants and to have everything done for her. I'm afraid it will be very difficult and uncomfortable.'

'But she would have you and Frances to help her,' said Lady Myrtle. 'At least—no, dear Jacinth, you really must not anticipate troubles that may never, that I trust will never come.'

Then she hesitated and stopped short, and seemed to be thinking deeply.

'My dearest child,' she said at last, 'you are very young, and I have a great dread of forgetting how young you are. I have too, as you know, a very great respect for parental authority. I would never take upon myself to interfere in any real way with your life, unless I had your father and mother's approval. But this I may say, so far as I can possibly influence them and the whole circumstances, you may rely upon it that this nightmare of Barmettle shall never be anything but a nightmare. Though at the same time I am most strongly of opinion that your father must not return to India.'

'Oh, thank you, dear Lady Myrtle, thank you a thousand times for what you say,' said Jacinth.

'It is your father's health I am thinking of too,' said the old lady. 'Your aunt feels sure that it is time for him to come home for good. He has been out there so long, and he is not a young man. He is a good deal older than your mother.'

'Yes,' Jacinth replied. 'He is fifteen years older; and mamma has always been wonderfully strong. But even for her it would be much nicer to come home now. Seventeen years is a long time, and only one year and one six-months at home! Oh, I do feel so much happier since you have spoken so to me—even though it makes me rather frightened about papa. It would be terrible for his health to fail.'

'We must make him take it in time,' said Lady Myrtle cheerfully. 'I don't think there is any cause for immediate anxiety. Yes—nothing is sadder than when the head of a house breaks down prematurely.'

Her words, following upon her own, struck Jacinth curiously. What was it they made her think of? What family had she been hearing of whose father was in bad health? Ah—yes, it was these Harpers! How tiresome it was that they seemed always to be 'turning up,' as Jacinth expressed it to herself! There were scores and scores of other families in as bad trouble as they; the world was full of such cases.

'If Frances had been here,' thought Jacinth, 'she would have been certain to begin about them and their father—only annoying Lady Myrtle and doing no good. Not but that I'm very sorry for them. I hope their father is better, I'm sure.'

Alas! these two or three months had not passed so quickly or so brightly in the—no, I must not say in the Harpers' pleasant though plain old house at Southcliff, for Hedge End was let, and the three girls were living in Mrs Newing's tiny rooms in Harbour Street—the rooms where Camilla had declared they would be so cosy and comfortable, enjoying a rest from all housekeeping cares.

And as far as the material details of their life was concerned they would have been more than content, though it was a new experience to them to be even temporarily without a home; and now and then Camilla and Bessie grew a little anxious about Margaret, and wondered if they were taking as good care of her as mother would have done. For the little girl looked very pale and delicate sometimes, and her appetite was fitful.

'I wonder if it is Mrs Newing's cooking,' said Camilla to her confidante, Bessie. 'At home we could always get some nice little thing; mother is so clever in that way, with father having been so long ill. But here it would be impossible to try to cook anything ourselves.'

'And whatever we do, we mustn't worry mother about Margaret,' said Bessie. 'Mother needs all the cheering possible to keep up her spirits, with dear father being so suffering still. Oh, Camilla, I wonder if we shall soon have better news?'

Things had not improved, even to the limited extent which was all that Captain Harper had counted upon, as rapidly as the former time that he had been an inmate of the private hospital for three months. He was weaker than then, and perhaps his intense anxiety to benefit by the effort that had in every sense cost them all so dear, was against him.

The doctors, so wrote Mrs Harper to her elder girls, now spoke of three months more, not as desirable but as a necessity. And how it was to be managed she could not see. Furthermore, to give a chance of anything approaching cure, or rather lasting improvement, the regulation visit to the German baths must, they now declared, be followed up by a winter in a mild, dry climate.

'Of this,' said the mother, 'we are not even thinking. The three more months here are all we can contemplate, and I dare not tell your father how impossible even that seems. It is out of the question, as he is, to move him to an ordinary hospital where I could not be with him. I believe if we did so he would give up the struggle and quietly resign himself to leaving us.'

'Camilla, he must stay,' said Bessie. 'There is one thing, these people do want to keep on the house longer?'

'For two months—not three,' said Camilla, 'and we have not yet given them a decided answer.'

'Then let us take it upon ourselves to decide,' said Bessie. 'And we will write and tell mother that is settled. And what else can we do, Camilla? Father must stay as long as the doctors think necessary. It is the middle of March now; he has been there two months. I suppose he should stay till the middle or end of July.'

'And then go abroad,' said Camilla.

'Ah well, we scarcely can hope for that. But I think, Camilla, you should write to Aunt Flora: father will never do it, and mother would not without his leave. But we can. Ask her to lend us some money, whatever is strictly necessary, and tell her that somehow we will repay her. She is very generous, and she would never forgive us if we let father lose the last chance, for want of anything she could do.'

'But she has so little ready money,' said Camilla. 'I don't know if they are bad managers, for they have a good income, but it all seems to go.'

'Father says they cannot help it. Uncle Lyle has so much to keep up out there—entertaining and all sorts of things,' said Bessie. 'But I am sure they would manage to lend us—how much?—fifty or a hundred pounds? And Camilla, we will repay it. Can we not save a little on our living? I suppose we couldn't do with a room less; it would not be wholesome for Margaret. And for her sake too we must not attempt still plainer food.'

'No,' said Camilla, 'I fear that is impossible. You see Margaret is so quick. She would notice in a moment if you and I eat less or at all differently from her. But—yes, perhaps the time has come when we must apply definitely to Aunt Flora. I will write by the next mail.'

'And Camilla, if we tide over this present trouble,' said Bessie, 'I think you or I must do something—something to earn money by. I am too young to be a governess yet, but I know—she almost said it to me—that Miss Scarlett would take me even now as a sort of pupil-teacher, and two years hence I think I might be a governess—to young children.'

'It may have to be,' the elder sister agreed. 'But the question is which of us should go. I could be a governess already, but then that stops your and Margaret's education. And, Bessie, it would be rather additionally trying to father and mother—father especially—for you to be in that kind of position at Thetford, the very part of the country our family comes from. And so near to Robin Redbreast too.'

Bessie reared her head. 'I don't mind that,' she said. 'I should rather like it the better.'

'But father?' said Camilla gently. And brave Bessie was silent.

The letter to Mrs Lyle was written and sent. It reached her in her new Indian quarters about ten days before Mrs Mildmay started on her return home.

* * * * *

It was May; the charming capricious month we dream of all the year round, always believing—thanks to poets and childish remembrances rose-coloured by the lapse of time—that if the weather is cold and gray and generally disappointing this year, it is quite an exception and never has been so before: it was May before the day came on which Lady Myrtle Goodacre's landau set off in state for Thetford railway station, with Jacinth, Frances, and Eugene already occupying it, and a vacant seat for Miss Alison Mildmay whom they were to call for on the way.

Frances and even Eugene were almost speechless with excitement: Jacinth, though wound up to a tremendous pitch, was too proud and too self-contained by habit to show what she was feeling.

'Lady Myrtle hopes you will come back with us, Aunt Alison,' she said quietly, 'at least to spend the rest of the day, as you wouldn't consent to come to stay for two or three.'

Miss Mildmay, before replying, glanced at her niece with a curious sort of admiration, not altogether free from disappointment.

'Jacinth certainly is extraordinarily self-controlled,' she thought. Very self-controlled, like very reserved people do not always entirely appreciate their own characteristics in another! But aloud she replied much in the same matter-of-fact tone.

'It is very good of her, but I would rather find my own way home from the station. I will come out to Robin Redbreast to-morrow or the day after to have a talk with your mother. She will have more than enough to occupy her to-day.'

Jacinth secretly commended her aunt's good sense, but the younger ones seemed a little sorry. They wanted everybody to be as happy as themselves.

'It isn't that you don't think there'd be room enough in the carriage, Aunt Alison, is it?' said Frances, anxiously. 'For the closed wagonette is coming too for mamma's maid and the luggage, and I wouldn't mind the least bit getting into it.'

'Or I could go on the box,' suggested Eugene. 'I could quite squeeze in between Bailey and Fred, and I'm sure they wouldn't mind.'

'Thank you, dears,' said Miss Mildmay, more warmly than she had spoken to Jacinth; 'thank you very much. No; it is not on that account. And indeed there is plenty of room in here for Eugene extra. But I shall enjoy more, coming to-morrow or the day after, and then you must all spare me your mother for an hour or so.'

The train was late of course. There was that strange odd bit of time we all know so well—of waiting and expectancy, intensified of course in the present case by the fact that the mother they were about to meet was literally a stranger to the three children. Even Jacinth was a good deal paler than her wont, when at last the train slowly steamed into the station and drew up beside the platform where they were standing.

Would she have known her mother, she asked herself afterwards? Scarcely; there were several passengers who might have been the one. She felt almost bewildered when Aunt Alison turned from all, to hurry forward to greet a slight, girlish-looking figure—girlish in herself, though not in attire or bearing—who was gazing about her with eager eyes.

'Eugenia.'

'Alison,' and the two sisters-in-law had caught each other's hands and kissed each other before Jacinth had really taken in that this was 'mamma!'

Then Miss Mildmay drew back without another word than 'Here they are! I did want to give them over to you, myself, you see,' and her usually calm voice trembled a little.

And Jacinth felt an arm thrown round her, and the words whispered into her ear, 'My darling child!' and for almost the first time in her life a choking sensation that was not pain, and a rush to her eyes of tears that were not sorrow, made her dimly conscious that she knew her own nature and its depths less fully than she had imagined.

And then in turn she fell back a little while the two younger ones, with a glad cry from Francie of 'Mamma, mamma!' and a solemn 'It's me; I'm Eugene,' from the small brother, were drawn close, close, by the arms that had not held them for so long, and kissed as they never remembered having been kissed before.

And somehow—I don't think any of them could ever clearly have told how; perhaps Mrs Mildmay's maid had a head on her shoulders and was equal to the occasion—they all found themselves in the landau again; all, that is to say, except Aunt Alison, who stood waving good-bye to them all from the curbstone, her face for once actually rosy with excitement.

'Mamma!' said Frances, and then she stopped short. 'It's too lovely, I can't speak.'

Eugene was stroking his mother's mantle. It was of soft downy material, rich in colour and texture.

'How pretty!' he said.

Jacinth glanced at it and the rest of her mother's attire, and at her mother herself. She felt proud of her, of her undeniable beauty and air of distinction—proud to present her to Lady Myrtle—and yet——

'I wonder if mamma is very much taken up with her clothes,' she thought. 'I wonder if she is extravagant. I expect I shall have to take a good deal upon me, as Lady Myrtle said. I suppose people in India really grow very unpractical.'

Poor Lady Myrtle! Little had she intended her words to be thus travestied.

But the reflection was not disagreeable to Jacinth, to whom a position of responsibility and management was always congenial. She took her mother's hand in hers, and smiling at Eugene replied: 'Yes indeed. What lovely fur trimming, mamma! And what a pretty bonnet! You couldn't have had that in India, surely?'

'No,' said Mrs Mildmay, smiling back at her children, 'I got one or two things in London yesterday. I thought you would like me to look nice, especially as I was going straight to Robin Redbreast. I don't believe poor dear Aunt Alison would have seen any difference if I had come back in the same clothes I went away in all those years ago.'

'No,' agreed Frances, 'I don't believe she would.'

But Jacinth looked a little grave; she could not quite 'make out' her mother.

'Aunt Alison spends almost nothing on herself,' she said. 'She gives away every farthing she possibly can.'

'I know she does, dear. She is the most self-denying person in those ways that I have ever met,' said Mrs Mildmay heartily, though mentally hoping to herself that Jacinth was not very matter-of-fact. But Eugene was looking very solemn.

'What are you thinking of, my boy? his mother asked.

'Those clothes,' he said, 'those clothes what you went away with. They must be wored out. I was only two when you went away, mamma?'

This made them all laugh, which was perhaps a good thing—a slight relief to the over-excitement which in their different ways all had been experiencing.

'Mamma,' said Frances earnestly, when the laughter had calmed down, 'I must tell you, I had no idea you were so pretty. I think you are the very prettiest person I ever saw.'

'So do I,' Eugene chimed in.

Mrs Mildmay could not resist kissing again the two sweet flushed faces.

'My darlings,' she said, 'I hope you will always think so, in one way, even when my hair is white and my face old and wrinkled.'

'I hope,' thought Jacinth to herself, 'I hope mamma isn't—not vain, it's such a contemptible word—but I hope she doesn't care too much for looks and outside things of that kind.'

But the very defining her thoughts startled her. She knew she had no right to begin criticising her mother in this way, and she pulled herself up.

'Mamma,' she said, and her tone was both perfectly natural and simple, and more unconstrained than Mrs Mildmay had yet heard it—'mamma, isn't it really delightful, and isn't it almost wonderful that we should be all staying with Lady Myrtle and taking you to her? Isn't it really like a fairy story?'

'It is indeed,' said Mrs Mildmay. 'It is wonderful. The way that she seemed to start up just when—so soon after we had lost dear granny, and in a sense our home.'

'It would have been lovely, of course, for you to come back to us anyway,' said Frances, 'but it wouldn't have been so lovely if we'd all been going to Aunt Alison's. It's rather a poky place, you know, mamma, and in India I suppose the houses are all enormous. I can only remember like in a dream, about very big, very white rooms.'

'The last house we've had was far from enormous,' said her mother with a smile, 'still it was very nice. I often wished you and Jassie could have been with us there.'

'But—oh mamma, you'll never go back again,' pleaded Frances. 'We've got dear papa's coming to look forward to now, and after that—never mind where we live, if only we stay together.'

Mrs Mildmay smiled, though for the first time with a touch of sadness.

'Don't let us spoil to-day by looking forward, dear; except, as you say, to your father's coming. If he were here, everything would seem perfect.'

'And here's Robin Redbreast,' exclaimed Jacinth, as they turned the corner of the lane, 'and "Uncle Marmy's gates" wide open in your honour. Generally we drive in at the side. Now, mamma, take a good look. First impressions are everything, you know. Isn't this perfect?'

She seemed full of enthusiasm, which her mother was glad to see and quick to respond to.

'It is beautiful: I have never seen anything like it,' she replied warmly. 'And could there have been a more exquisite day?'

'And mamma, mamma,' cried Eugene, 'you know, don't you, it was all me that got friends with Lady Myrtle; me, with getting—wursty, that day, you know?'



CHAPTER XIV.

A COURAGEOUS PLEADER.

Lady Myrtle was standing in the porch. It seemed to her only fitting that she should come thus far to welcome such a guest, and something in her almost tremulously affectionate greeting touched Mrs Mildmay keenly.

'It is so good of you—meeting me like this,' the younger woman whispered, as she threw her arms round her old friend. 'And, oh, how delightful it is to have you and this to come to!'

'My dear, my dear,' said Lady Myrtle, 'don't thank me. Only let me see that you and your children are happy and at home with me; that is all I care about.'

And again she kissed the Eugenia she had not seen since her childhood.

Mrs Mildmay was very like Frances; correctly speaking, one should put it the other way, but as a new actor on the scene of this little story it is natural thus to express it. Her face had something indescribably childlike about it; her blue eyes were almost wistful, though the whole expression was bright and happy and very changeful. Yet there was plenty of 'character'—no dearth of good firm lines, with yet an entire absence of anything denoting hardness or obstinacy; the whole giving from the first candid glance an impression of extreme ingenuousness and single-mindedness.



'You are not like your mother,' said Lady Myrtle, when the little group had made its way into the drawing-room where tea was already waiting. 'I knew you were not. Yet something in your voice recalls her. I suppose you can scarcely remember her,' she went on, 'not well enough to see the really marvellous resemblance between her and my child here—my child as well as yours?' and she smiled at Jacinth who was standing by, and laid her hand affectionately on the girl's arm.

'Oh yes,' Mrs Mildmay replied, 'I remember enough for that. And then I have one or two excellent portraits, besides the large one at Stannesley; at least my father always told me they were excellent. And even when Jassie was quite tiny, he saw the likeness and was delighted at it. But I—I am quite "Denison" I know, and so are Francie and Eugene. The odd thing is that Jassie is also in some ways more like the Mildmays than the two others.'

'I have never seen your husband, you know,' said Lady Myrtle. 'I can't say that the likeness to good Miss Alison Mildmay has ever struck me.'

The quaint way in which the old lady said it made them all smile a little—all, that is to say, except Jacinth. She had not altogether relished her mother's remark.

But that evening was a most happy one—perhaps the very happiest the two younger children had ever known—and one certainly to be marked with a white stone in the memory of all the five who spent it together. By a tacit agreement no uncertain or anxious questions were touched upon. Mrs Mildmay was able to give a good account of their father's health at the time of her leaving him, to the children, and made them all laugh by her account of her brother Marmaduke's description of the terrible formality of that first evening at Market Square Place. She seemed gifted with a wonderful amount of fun and merriment: Jacinth caught herself laughing after a fashion which was very rare with her.

'Mamma is ever so much younger than I,' she said to herself when she found herself alone for the night. 'She is as charming and sweet as she can be. But I can foresee some things pretty clearly. It is a good thing I am of a different character. What would happen if we were all as impulsive and'—'childish' was the word in her thoughts, but again she felt a little startled at the length to which her criticism of her mother was going, and pulled herself up—'as impulsive as Francie, and as mamma must be by nature?'

And she fell asleep in the midst of a not unpleasing picture of herself as the wise, considerate prop of the whole family, looked up to by her parents, leant upon by Lady Myrtle, a Lady Bountiful to all within her reach, a——But here I think her imaginings probably faded into the phantasmagoria of dreams.

Mrs Mildmay had bidden her elder girl a fond good-night; then she hastened along the passage for a moment's peep into Frances's little room.

'The child will be asleep, I daresay,' she thought to herself. 'It is almost selfish of me to risk waking her. But I will be very careful, and I really cannot resist the delight of seeing them in bed, of knowing they are under the same roof again at last.'

And she stole in. It was a moonlight night. Francie had been in bed some little time, but she was not asleep. She was lying with her eyes wide open gazing out through the unshaded window, which was within her view, at the tree tops, illumined by the silvery radiance, and swaying gently in the soft night breeze; her shaggy hair making a background on the pillow for her sweet, childish face. And at the faint sound her mother made on entering she started up.

'Mamma, mamma!' she cried, as Mrs Mildmay knelt down and threw her arms round the little figure. 'My own little mamma, my own, my own! to think it is you, to think I really and truly have you. Oh, can I ever be so happy again! Oh, mamma darling, I don't know how to thank God enough; that was what I was thinking about when you came in. No, no, you didn't wake me. I haven't been asleep.'

'My darling, my own little girl!' whispered Mrs Mildmay.

'Mamma dear,' Frances went on, after a moment's beautiful silence. 'I feel already that I can tell you everything. Now there's one thing; it's come into my mind again since I've been in bed; I'm afraid I forgot about it in the first rush of happiness, you know, but now I've remembered. Mamma, don't you think when we're awfully happy we should try to do something for other people—that God means us to? Well, it's about the Harpers. Oh, mamma, I'm afraid they are having such very bad troubles just now.'

Mrs Mildmay started a little.

'You don't mean, dear—you haven't heard anything quite lately, about the father, Captain Harper, have you?'

'No,' said Frances, 'I've not heard anything. Miss Falmouth was the only girl who knew about them away from school, and she has left. But you remember I wrote to you that Bessie and Margaret mightn't come back, and they haven't. And I'm sure it's because they've got poorer with their father being so ill. Mamma, did you hear anything more from their aunt before you left?'

'Yes,' said Mrs Mildmay sadly. 'I heard a good deal. All there is to hear, indeed. A letter from the eldest daughter, Camilla Harper—the one who wrote to you—came to Mrs Lyle just before I left. She showed it to me. I am afraid it is as you say, Francie; they have very heavy troubles and anxieties indeed.'

'And don't you think they're good, really very good people, mamma?' asked the child eagerly.

'I think they seem quite wonderfully good,' said her mother, warmly. 'I cannot understand; I mean I can scarcely realise, how they can all be so brave and cheerful, when one thing after another—one misfortune after another—has come to try them so terribly. Yes, it almost frightens me to think of our happiness in comparison with their troubles, Francie.'

'But mamma,' and Frances hesitated. 'If we can do anything to help them? Wouldn't that make it seem righter? I mean as if we were meant to do it.'

'I am going to try,' said Mrs Mildmay. Her voice was low and quiet, but it carried assurance with it. 'Your father and I talked a great deal about it after we heard the worst of things from Mrs Lyle. And we decided that it would be only right, even at the risk of annoying or even offending Lady Myrtle. It seems "meant" as you say, Francie—the coincidences of it all—my coming straight here, and that letter reaching Mrs Lyle just before I left. So we quite made up our minds about it.'

Frances drew a deep breath of thankfulness.

'It does seem as if everything I have most wanted was going to come,' she said.

Then, as her mother, after kissing her again, was turning to leave the room, telling her she really 'must go to sleep,' the little girl called her back for a moment.

'Mamma, dear,' she said. 'If you don't mind, would you please not say anything to Jass about what we've been talking of.'

Mrs Mildmay looked a little surprised.

'Why not, dear? Why should I not tell her as well as you?'

'Oh well, because Jass didn't know Bessie and Margaret nearly as well as I did, and you must have seen by her letters that she didn't care about them like me,' said Frances.

'But that does not, in one way, much signify,' replied her mother. 'Once Jacinth knows all about them she will feel as we do: your father and I do not know any of them personally. It is not as friends of ours that I would in any way plead their cause with their own near relation.'

'No, of course not,' said Frances. But still she did not seem satisfied. 'Jacinth has always been so afraid of vexing Lady Myrtle by seeming to interfere,' she said. 'And even Aunt Alison said it was better not.'

'Very likely not. You are both too young to have it in your power to do anything. Still, I am sure you have lost no opportunity of speaking highly of the girls whom you do think so highly of.'

'Yes,' said Frances, quietly. 'I have done that. But somehow, mamma, I have vexed Jass about it several times. I shouldn't like her to think I had "spoilt" your first evening, by beginning about the Harpers. That's what she might say.'

'I will give her no reason for being vexed with you, dear. I can understand her fear of vexing Lady Myrtle—I feel the same myself—and when I tell her, Jacinth, all about it, it will be in no way mixed up with you, Francie. She will only need to understand the whole thing thoroughly to agree with us.'

And Frances fell asleep in happy confidence that 'mamma' would put it all right. How delightful it was to have her at hand to lean upon!

But Mrs Mildmay had spoken rather more confidently about Jacinth than she quite felt. Frances's words reminded her of the cold, unsympathising way in which her elder daughter had alluded in her letters to the Harpers; after knowing all that Frances had written to her mother.

'Jacinth is thoughtful and considerate beyond her years,' thought she, 'but I do trust she is no way selfish or calculating. Oh no, that is impossible. I must not be fanciful. Marmy warned me that I might find her self-contained and even self-opinionated, but that is very different from anything mean or selfish. It is sad, all the same, to know nothing of one's own child for one's self, at first hand. Whatever the poor Harpers' trials have been,' she went on, as Frances had once said to Bessie, 'at least they have been spared this terrible, unnatural separation.'

And the thought brought back to her again the task that was before her on the morrow. She was not a little nervous about it. 'But I must not delay,' she said to herself. 'If anything is to be done to help them in this present crisis, it must be at once. And I promised Mrs Lyle not to put off. I wonder when I shall have the best chance of a good talk with Lady Myrtle. Alison is coming over in the morning, she said. Naturally she is anxious to hear all about Frank. I wish it had not happened that I was obliged to begin upon a certainly painful, a possibly offensive topic with the dear old lady just at the very first! And when she is so very, very good to us!'

But Eugenia Mildmay was not the type of woman to shrink from what she believed to be an undoubted duty because it was painful to herself, or even to others.

'Dear little Frances,' was almost her last waking thought, 'I feel as if I already understood her perfectly. And oh, I do hope I shall be wise and judicious with my Jassie too.'

Every trace of fatigue had vanished from Mrs Mildmay's bright face when they all met at breakfast the next morning; the 'all' including Lady Myrtle, who had now begun again to come down early, since the fine mild weather had, for the time, dispelled her chronic bronchitis. She looked round the table with a beaming face.

'It is long since I have had such a party at breakfast,' she said. 'Never before, I think, indeed, since I have been settled at Robin Redbreast, and that is a good while ago. To make it perfect we only want your husband, Eugenia, whom you know, I have never seen.'

'Well, I hope it will not be very long before you do see him; and I can assure you he is very eager to see you, dear Lady Myrtle,' replied Mrs Mildmay.

'How like mamma is to Frances!' thought Jacinth. It struck her even more forcibly this morning than the day before.

'Is Colonel Mildmay dark or fair? Does he resemble his sister?' inquired the old lady.

Mrs Mildmay considered.

'No; I scarcely think so,' she said. 'And yet there is a family likeness. The odd thing is, as I was saying, that though Jacinth "takes after" my mother's family so decidedly, yet she is more like the Mildmays than either Francie or Eugene.'

'I don't see it, I confess,' said Lady Myrtle drily, and Mrs Mildmay caught for the first time a glimpse of the cold manner the old lady could assume if not altogether well pleased. But in less than an instant Lady Myrtle seemed herself to regret it. 'I mean to say I see no resemblance in Jacinth to Miss Alison Mildmay. Of course I cannot judge as to her having any to her father.'

'Papa has dark hair, like Jass,' said Frances. 'But he's very nice-looking.'

'The "but" doesn't sound very complimentary to me, Francie,' said Jacinth laughingly; and her mother, glancing at her, was struck by the wonderful charm of the smile that overspread her face.

'I wasn't thinking of you that way,' said Frances, bluntly. 'I was thinking of Aunt Alison.'

'Aunt Alison's not pretty,' said Eugene. 'Her's too—not smiley enough, not like mamma.'

'Eugene!' said his mother. But Eugene did not seem at all snubbed.

'A propos of Miss Alison Mildmay,' said Lady Myrtle, 'she is coming to see you to-day, is she not? She must be anxious to hear all about her brother.'

'Yes,' said Mrs Mildmay, 'she will be coming quite early. Jassie told us you are often busy in the morning, so I thought that would be the best time for me to be with her.'

'Jacinth knows all my ways,' said Lady Myrtle with a smile of approval. 'Yes, that will do nicely; Miss Mildmay must stay to luncheon, and then you and I, Eugenia, can drive her back. Will you drive with me this afternoon? I always enjoy a talk in a carriage along our quiet roads.'

'Thank you; that will be very pleasant,' said Mrs Mildmay. And no one would have suspected the slight sinking of heart with which she said to herself that this would clearly be the best opportunity for what she had to lay before her kind hostess as to the poor Harpers.

'We begin school again on Monday,' said Frances. 'I do hope it will be fine till then. Jass, won't you stay with Eugene and me this afternoon? We do so want to get the house we are building finished so that we can have tea in it on Lady Myrtle's birthday.'

'Yes,' Mrs Mildmay interposed quickly, 'that will do very well, and to-morrow perhaps Jassie may drive with you, Lady Myrtle, and then I will invite myself to spend the afternoon with you two, shall I?'

Her quick tact, founded on sympathy, warned her of the possibility of the elder girl feeling herself thrown out of the place she had naturally come to feel as her own beside the old lady.

'And Lady Myrtle is so devoted to Jacinth too. She would miss her, even though she would not like to seem to prefer her to me,' thought the mother; and the expression in the two faces rewarded her for her consideration.

Frances had her own ideas as to her mother's intentions in connection with the proposed drive that afternoon. But she was already perfectly at rest in the delightful certainty that 'mamma would know what was best to do.' So, though deeply interested and in a sense anxious, she had no nervous misgiving as to the result of the effort which she felt sure was going to be made in behalf of her friends, and she spent the afternoon very happily with her sister and brother, working at the famous house they had been allowed to build in a corner of the garden. It was very interesting, and even Jacinth, in some ways less 'grown-up' than she liked to fancy herself, found it very absorbing. By half-past four o'clock they had all worked so hard that they really began to be very tired and rather hot.

'I wish it was tea-time,' said Jacinth. 'We are all to have tea together while the holidays last. Lady Myrtle thought mamma would like it. And, of course, you and Eugene, Francie, will come in at the end of dinner as you did last night. I wonder why Lady Myrtle and mamma are so long. I suppose they've gone a long drive.'

'They started rather late,' said Frances. 'Aunt Alison was talking to Lady Myrtle a good while after the carriage was at the door. But I wonder they're not back by now. Don't you think we'd better go in now and get tidy, so as to be quite ready when they come?'

They did so. But for once Frances was the more expeditious of the two. When Mrs Mildmay entered her own room on returning from the drive, a little figure, unexceptionably neat as to hair and hands and garments, darted out from behind the window-curtains whence she had been watching the drive up to the house.

'Mamma, dear,' she exclaimed, 'don't ring for Syme. Mayn't I help you to take off your things for once? I do so want to ask you—you don't mind, do you?—have you been able to say anything to Lady Myrtle? I had a feeling that you meant to speak about it the very first chance you could.'

Mrs Mildmay looked a little agitated.

'Francie, dear,' she said, 'I haven't time to tell you about it just now. We must hurry down to tea. But I have done something, and I almost hope I have made a beginning towards more. All I can, all it would be right for me to tell you, I will. But I scarcely think I can do so to-day. Come to my room quite early to-morrow morning, half an hour or so before breakfast. As soon as we have had tea just now, I have promised to help—at least she puts it so—Lady Myrtle to write a rather difficult letter.'

'Is it to the Harpers?' half whispered Frances.

Her mother nodded.

Frances gave a sort of skip of joy.

'Oh, mamma, how lovely!' she exclaimed. 'How clever you are! I do believe everything's going to come right.'

'Don't be too hopeful, dear. But at least their present terrible difficulties will be a little smoothed, I trust.

And it was no use telling Frances not to be too hopeful. She seemed almost to dance as she followed her mother down-stairs, and the drawing-room at Robin Redbreast had rarely, if ever, heard brighter talk and merrier laughter than went on this afternoon round the tea-table, where Jacinth did the honours as if she were the recognised daughter of the house.

It went perhaps somewhat against the grain with her to be told, though in the kindest manner, that Lady Myrtle and Mrs Mildmay had some business letters to write in the boudoir, and must not be disturbed till post-time. But she was a sensible girl on the whole, and really glad to see the cordial understanding between her mother and the friend who seemed to her now by adoption almost a second mother. And she was without the slightest suspicion that the letters in question concerned the Harpers, of whom indeed for some time past she had almost left off thinking at all.

'Possibly it's already something about the London appointment for papa,' she thought. 'Lady Myrtle is always so energetic and business-like. I daresay she would have liked to consult me about it, but then it would scarcely have seemed right not to make mamma the first of course.'

And she answered so pleasantly that she and Frances had a duet they wanted to practise before playing it to their mother, that Mrs Mildmay's slight instinctive misgiving as to her elder daughter's docility and reasonableness was for the time completely dispersed.

'To-morrow, you know, dear Jacinth, you are to drive with me,' said Lady Myrtle, 'while your mother is going to have Francie and Eugene all to herself.'

Perhaps the result of Mrs Mildmay's conversation with her hostess during their drive that afternoon will be best shown by one of the letters which the Robin Redbreast postbag carried off that very evening. It was addressed to Mrs Harper at a certain number in a quiet bye-street in the north-west of London, and ran thus:

ROBIN REDBREAST, THETFORD, May 4, 187-.

MY DEAR MRS HARPER—I write to you instead of to your husband, Captain Harper, who is by birth my nephew, as I understand that he might be upset by an unexpected letter, being at present in a critical state of health. I regret that it should be so, and that your anxieties should be increased by other difficulties, and I enclose a draft on my London bankers for L500, which will, I trust, relieve you from your most pressing cares. I ask you to accept this in a kindly spirit, though from a complete stranger. It is the gift of an aged woman who is always glad to have the privilege of helping those whose difficulties may become privately known to her, as well as of responding to the many public appeals for assistance. But it is not the gift of a relative. From a certain date, now many years ago, my brother Bernard Harper and all connected with him died to me as completely as though he had never existed, and I feel it only honest to put the matter in its true light at the risk of wounding not unnatural susceptibilities. I ask you also to accept my sincere good wishes for Captain Harper's restoration to health, and I remain, yours faithfully,

MYRTLE CAMILLA GOODACRE.

It was a strange letter. And strange as it was, it had been more eccentric still, but for Mrs Mildmay's strenuous efforts to soften its expressions and accentuate the real sympathy which had dictated the gift. It was a strange position altogether. The tears had risen into the old lady's bright eyes when her old friend Jacinth Moreland's daughter laid before her the sad facts of the case, and the life or death that not improbably hung upon her response. Never had good cause a better advocate. She read aloud the letter written by Camilla Harper to her aunt in India, and confided by Mrs Lyle to Mrs Mildmay; she told of Captain Harper's honourable career, and of the brave struggle made by him and his wife against the overwhelming difficulties which had come upon them through no fault—no imprudence even—of their own; she described the good promise of their children, how the sons were all already more or less 'distinguished, the daughters models of girlish excellence.'

'I quite believe it all,' the old lady calmly replied. 'It is very wonderful; there must be a good strain somewhere in the blood, and struggle and adversity are grand teachers, we are told. It is very interesting, and I am most ready to help them in any way you advise, my dear Eugenia, or that you think would be accepted. But understand me, I would do the same if I had never heard their name till to-day. It is not as relations; Bernard Harper's descendants are neither kith nor kin of mine, and this must be understood.'

Mrs Mildmay seemed about to speak, but hesitated.

'What is it, my dear? Do not be afraid of vexing me: do say what is in your mind,' said the old lady.

'You are so good, dear Lady Myrtle, so good and kind, that it seems impertinence for me to differ from you,' the younger woman replied. 'It was only that your words struck me curiously. Can we decide and alter things in that way? Our relations are our relations; can we, when it suits us, say they are not? Can we throw off the duties and responsibilities of relationship? Of course they vary enormously; sometimes they scarcely exist, and one can lay down no rule. But still, in the present case, it is because the Harpers are your relations, and yet by no fault of their own entirely alienated from you, that I have told you about them. These are solid substantial facts; we cannot undo facts.'

Lady Myrtle was silent. Mrs Mildmay glanced at her anxiously, very anxiously. But there was no sign of irritation in the quiet old face—only of thought, deep thought. And there was a grave softness in the usually keen eyes, as if they were reviewing far distant or far past scenes.

At last, 'Thank you, my dear, for your candour,' she said. 'Well, leave that question alone. I will help this family and at once, because it seems to me a clear duty to do so. Can you not be satisfied with this practical response to your appeal, my dear?'

'I thank you with all my heart,' said Mrs Mildmay earnestly, 'both for your generosity and for your patience with my presumption.'

But she evaded a direct reply to Lady Myrtle's question, and her friend did not press her farther.

The result of this conversation we have seen in the letter with its enclosure which was posted that very evening. The former was not a source of unmitigated satisfaction to Mrs Mildmay. For Lady Myrtle insisted on the insertion of the last few lines.

It would not be honest, she maintained, to withhold the expression of her true sentiments.

So with what she had achieved, Mrs Mildmay was forced to be content, though there were times during the next day or two in which she asked herself if perhaps she had not done more harm than good? And times again, when with the rebound of her naturally buoyant nature, she allowed herself to hope that she had succeeded in inserting the thin edge of the wedge; in 'making,' as she had expressed it to Francie, 'a beginning towards more.'



CHAPTER XV.

LADY MYRTLE'S INTENTIONS.

And Francie, during those few days, was her mother's only confidante. Various reasons made Mrs Mildmay decide not as yet to come upon the subject with Jacinth. While still to all intents and purposes so much of a stranger to her daughter, she felt anxious to avoid all sore or fretted ground; all discussion which might lead her prematurely to judge or misjudge Jacinth. To Lady Myrtle, of course, she said nothing of this; but she suspected, as was indeed the case, that the old lady would feel no inclination to talk about the Harpers to her young companion. There were plenty of pleasanter things to talk about during the long drives on which, on most alternate afternoons, Jacinth accompanied their hostess; there were reminiscences of the past, always interesting to the girl, awakened to fresh vividness by Mrs Mildmay's own recollections of her mother and her own childhood; there were, more engrossing still, plans for the future, when 'papa' should return and be skilfully persuaded into renouncing India. And Lady Myrtle was nearly as great at castle-in-the-air building as Jacinth herself, and though too wise to discuss as yet with any one, especially with a girl who was really, notwithstanding her precocity, little more than a child, her still immatured intentions, Jacinth was far too acute, and Lady Myrtle too open and affectionate, for her young favourite not to be well aware how much her own future occupied and interested the old lady. Yet Jacinth was scarcely selfish in the common sense. She was capable, on the contrary, of great self-sacrifice for those she loved; her happy visions for days to come were by no means confined to, even though they might to a great extent revolve around, Jacinth Mildmay.

As seems often to happen when a looked-for letter, or reply to a letter, is of any peculiar importance, there was some delay in the acknowledgment of Lady Myrtle's communication by Mrs Harper. The old lady herself took it calmly enough. 'It should, as a business letter, have been replied to at once, but perhaps they are not business-like people, and are thinking it over,' was all she said.

Mrs Mildmay, on the contrary, and, so far as she understood it all, Frances, felt uneasy and perplexed. Mrs Mildmay was sorry for the Harpers to lay themselves open to the slightest appearance of disrespect or unpunctuality, and at the same time she had attacks of fear that Lady Myrtle's letter had hurt and wounded her relatives so deeply that they had decided to ignore it. Only, in that case, they would have returned the cheque.

'It is very absurd,' she said one evening to Frances. 'I don't generally "worry" about things at all, and I am quite sure I have never worried about any matter of our own as much. Except, perhaps, that time you all had scarlet fever at Stannesley, and somehow Marmy's letter missed the mail, and we were out of reach of telegraphing. Oh dear, I shall never forget that week!'

'Dear mamma,' said Francie, 'I quite know how you feel. I was so fidgety that time I sent on Camilla Harper's letter to you, though it wasn't anything like as important.'

But the very next morning the mystery was explained, and quite simply.

After breakfast Lady Myrtle sent for Mrs Mildmay to her boudoir, where she always interviewed her steward and transacted her business for the day.

'I have just got this, my dear,' she said, handing a letter to her guest, 'and I knew you would be anxious to see it. The delay, you see, was accidental.'

Her tone of voice somewhat reassured Mrs Mildmay; it was calm and unruffled. Nevertheless it was not without considerable anxiety that she took the sheet of paper from the old lady's hands and began to read it. It was from Mrs Harper—a touching yet dignified letter, and the cheque was not returned. Mrs Harper began by thanking Lady Myrtle warmly for her kindness; the money she had sent seemed indeed a 'godsend' in the real sense of the word, and no secondary considerations could make her think it would be right to refuse what might—what, she trusted and almost believed, would save her husband's life and restore him to health—'even,' she went on to say, 'if it were possible after this, for us to think of you as an utter stranger, even then I would not dare to refuse this wonderful help. But at the same time you will allow us, I feel sure, to accept it as a loan, even though several years may pass before it is possible for us to repay it. Your agreeing to this will only immeasurably deepen, instead of lessening our inexpressible obligation.' The letter then went on to give a few details of her husband's condition, and the hopes and fears attendant on it. 'I am writing in my lodgings,' Mrs Harper went on, 'before going to him as usual at the hospital. So he does not yet know of this wonderful gift. And I think, as in your kind thoughtfulness you wrote to me, not to him, I am justified in accepting your aid without consulting him, so that I may tell him it is done. Not that in my heart I have any misgiving as to the view he will take of my action.' And lastly came a simple explanation of the delay. Mrs Harper had been for a day or two at Southcliff, as little Margaret was not well, and the rather stupid landlady of her London lodgings had never thought of forwarding the letter, knowing she was so soon to return. This with a few earnest words of repeated thanks made the whole.

Mrs Mildmay looked up eagerly after she had finished it.

'You are pleased, dear Lady Myrtle?' she said. 'At least I mean,' and she grew a little confused, for the old lady remained rather ominously silent, 'you think it is a nice letter, don't you? It seems to me to show peculiarly good feeling and good taste, for it cannot have been an easy letter to write.'

'Oh yes, my dear, I quite agree with you,' said Lady Myrtle with just a faint touch of impatience. 'I don't see how any one could think otherwise of the letter. I am perfectly satisfied that—she,' as if she shrank from naming the old name, 'is an excellent woman; refined and cultivated, and everything she should be. And I have no doubt they are all thoroughly deserving of the high character they bear. I thank you—I really do—for having given me the opportunity of serving people who so clearly deserve help. And these cases of bravely endured, almost unsuspected poverty among the gently born appeal to one almost more than the sufferings of the recognised "poor," though, of course, it is right to help both.'

'Yes,' said Mrs Mildmay, 'I often feel it so. And it is very good of you to put things in this way, Lady Myrtle. It takes away my qualms about having interfered,' and she smiled a little.

'But, my dear, I have not done,' Lady Myrtle went on, a trifle testily, 'you must quite understand me. It is not the very least—no, no; quite the other way—not the very least because they are Harpers that I am glad to be of use to them. Neither this letter, nor your own arguments—nothing, my dear, will alter the facts I stated to you the other day.'

'No,' agreed Mrs Mildmay, and she could scarcely repress a little smile; 'that was what I said myself, dear Lady Myrtle; nothing can alter facts.'

'Your facts and mine are scarcely synonymous,' said Lady Myrtle, drily, a little annoyed with herself perhaps, for having unconsciously made use of Mrs Mildmay's own expression. But the annoyance was not deep, for in another moment she added cheerfully, 'We are quite together on one point, however, and that is in rejoicing that this help has come in time, as we may hope, to save a valuable life and much sorrow to those who cherish it. If this prove a fact, I think, my dear Eugenia, we may rest content.'

'Yes, indeed,' replied Mrs Mildmay, touched by her old friend's gentleness, though to herself she added, 'for the present, that is to say.'

And when to eager little Frances she related the upshot of her intervention, she did not retract her former words about having made a beginning.

'I think,' she said, 'I have got in the thin end of the wedge. When honest-minded people are a little shaken in anything, they try hard to persuade themselves by extra vehemence that they are not so.'

'Mamma, dear,' said Frances, 'I am beginning to believe not only that you are the best but the very cleverest woman in the world.'

And Mrs Mildmay laughed the joyous laugh which was one of her charms. The success which had attended this attempt of hers so far, did seem a happy omen with which to begin again her home life.

* * * * *

It would be interesting here to shift the scene and follow the reception of the good news by the three anxious girls at Southcliff. It would—to me at least it would—be so pleasant to tell of the happy faces that looked at each other with questioning eyes, as if the tidings in their mother's letter were almost too good to be true. It would be gratifying to watch the progress made by Captain Harper towards the recovery of greater health and strength than had been his for so many years, but even in telling a story—and the simplest of stories—one cannot always do as one is inclined. The time has not yet come for visiting the Harpers again. I must hurry on with some necessary explanations before leaving Thetford and dear old Robin Redbreast for very different surroundings.

That spring and early summer passed on the whole very happily for Mrs Mildmay and her three children. As far as Frances and her little brother were concerned, there were, I think, no drawbacks, except the fear—not, however, a very great one—that this delightful state of things might not last if papa should be obliged to return to India. But to a great extent their mother was able to reassure them, for in every letter Colonel Mildmay wrote more and more strongly of his earnest desire to settle at home, even though his doing so should lead to some privations falling on his family.

'Everything would be made up for by being together,' said Frances over and over again. 'I wouldn't care if we all had to live in quite a tiny cottage; would you, Jass?'

But Jacinth replied rather coldly that Frances was a silly child who didn't know what she was talking about. And Mrs Mildmay smiled, and endeavoured to prevent any approach to quarrelling, as she assured Frances that at all events they would be able to afford a comfortable house.

'I should rather think so,' said Jacinth in an authoritative and yet mysterious tone. 'I do wish, mamma, you would make Frances leave off speaking as if we were paupers.'

It is scarcely necessary to say that this conversation and others of a similar kind did not take place in Lady Myrtle's presence.

And towards the end of July, sooner than he had hoped for, Colonel Mildmay arrived. They were all still at Robin Redbreast to receive him, for on hearing how much earlier his leave was to begin than had been anticipated, Mrs Mildmay gave in to their kind hostess's earnest wish that they should remain there at least till her husband's coming.

'And as much longer as we can persuade him to stay,' Lady Myrtle added. 'He can so easily run up to town from this, as he is sure to have to be there often, about these appointments. And then it will be such a pleasure to his sister to have him near.'

'Oh yes, Thetford is as good a headquarters as we could have at present,' agreed Mrs Mildmay. 'But Thetford, dear Lady Myrtle, need not necessarily mean Robin Redbreast, you know! And it would not be difficult for us to find a nice little house there that would suit us for the time.'

'Well, well, it will be time enough to see to that when your husband is here,' replied the old lady.

And Mrs Mildmay, whose nature was not one to anticipate or dwell upon difficulties or uncertainties in the future which she could not in the present take action about, gratefully accepted her kind friend's hospitality, happy in the knowledge that her doing so really gave happiness to Lady Myrtle in return.

It was very strange to have papa in person, 'as large as life or a little larger,' said Frances. For they had not pictured to themselves quite such a tall, grave, rather awe-inspiring personage as he seemed at first. And they could scarcely understand how their mother could be so entirely at ease with him; how she could even laugh at him, and tease him now and then as if she was not 'the least atom' afraid of him.

But there was plenty of fun and humour hidden in the depths of Colonel Mildmay's dark eyes; it was not altogether wanting even in his sister Alison, though the circumstances of her life had not brought out several of the qualities developed by his wider and larger experiences. And before long his children, the two younger ones especially, got to know this, and to count upon their father's ever-ready sympathy in even the more childish of their interests and amusements. And Jacinth for her part was intensely proud of her father. He suited her in every way; except that now and then a slight suspicion insinuated itself that this very grand and dignified papa of hers, affectionate and even caressing as he could be when he laid his hand on her head and smoothed her soft hair, was laughing at her a little, which did not at all suit Jacinth's princess-like ideas of herself.

Still all was very happy, very happy indeed, the sweet summer days passing only too quickly; and for some two or three weeks nothing was said about 'plans,' though Colonel Mildmay went up to town more than once to visit his doctor and the War Office.

Then came an evening on which he returned from a hot day in London, fagged and rather knocked up, though with a certain expression on his face which told his watchful and observant wife that he had come to a decision, which she quietly waited to hear till he sought a good opportunity for telling it. The opportunity came later, when Lady Myrtle, a little tired by the unusual heat, had gone to her own room earlier than her wont, and the girls and Eugene had also said good-night.

'Come out into the garden, Eugenia. We can talk better there; it seems, even compared with India, such an airless night.'

'But the stars are beautiful, aren't they, Frank? I do love this place so,' said Mrs Mildmay as she seated herself on a rustic chair on the edge of the smooth bowling-green-like old lawn.

'You always find the stars—the bright spots in every sky, I think, dear,' said her husband. 'I confess I am feeling a little gloomy to-night, and yet I am glad it is decided.'

'It is decided, then? I thought so,' said Mrs Mildmay gently.

'Yes. It is quite certain that it would be madness for me ever to think of India again, now or years hence. So I have accepted Barmettle. I send in the formal papers to-morrow,' and he sighed a little.

'I expected it,' she said. 'I am very thankful, Frank, though you know how I sympathise with you about your having to—to—come down at all in position as it were.'

'Doing right can never be really coming down,' he replied. 'And it is right. The other thing in London would have been impossible, on our means, and not work enough either. And there is nothing against Barmettle; the place is healthy and cheap, and good education for Eugene, and no doubt—the two generally go together—good masters and governesses for the girls. Socially speaking, of course, there is not much to recommend the place, though there may be a few nice people there. But the girls are still very young; we must just do our best, and make as happy a home for them as we can.'

'Lady Myrtle is sure often to invite them here,' said Mrs Mildmay, 'Jacinth especially. When shall we have to go there, Frank? Will it be worth while to look out for a temporary house at Thetford, as we had thought of?'

'Scarcely,' said Colonel Mildmay. This was the question—'When shall we have to go there?'—which he had been the most dreading. He was glad to have it over. 'I fear,' he went on, 'you will be rather upset at finding how soon we have to go. I, at least. You and the children can stay on here awhile if you like, as dear old Lady Myrtle is sure to want you. But I myself must be at Barmettle the end of next month.'

'And you certainly shall not go alone,' said Mrs Mildmay, brightly. 'Do you think I would trust you to choose a house and all the rest of it? If Lady Myrtle will keep Eugene and one of the girls for a week or two, I and the other child will go north with you of course, and get settled before the others join us. There is only one thing I want to ask you, Frank; don't think it is that I have the faintest idea of making you change your intention; I do not even wish it. But you have not actually—officially—accepted the appointment yet?'

'No, not till to-morrow,' he replied.

'Then let me ask you this: Lady Myrtle has been so very, so more than good to us, that I should like to gratify her in every way we can. So before actually accepting this, I think we owe it to her to tell her about it. I know she is dying for you to take the London thing, and I would like her thoroughly to understand the reasons why you don't.'

'They are very simple and unanswerable,' said Colonel Mildmay, curtly.

'Yes, but Frank, though she has never said it actually, I have suspicions that she wants to help us practically—to increase our income,' said Mrs Mildmay with some hesitation.

'My dear child, I could never consent to anything of the kind,' exclaimed Colonel Mildmay, starting up. 'Her hospitality I am most grateful for; she may even do things for the children in the future, for Jacinth, I suppose, especially, as a godmother or a very old friend might. I am not foolishly proud. If she likes to leave you or Jacinth a little remembrance in her will, it would not be unnatural. But beyond that'——

'I know, I know,' interposed his wife, hurriedly. 'Of course I feel the same. But you see, if we talk this over with her, it will both gratify her and put things for always in their proper light.'

'Very well; I will do so, then,' said Colonel Mildmay. And then he turned and looked at his wife, for there was moonlight by this time, very earnestly. 'I don't doubt you, Eugenia,' he said; 'you know I never could. But you agree with me entirely, my dearest, do you not? I could never accept a position of the kind. And above all, when we know that there are others—the Harpers, I mean—who have claims upon her. For, but for the grandfather's misconduct, he would have had a good proportion of what is now Lady Myrtle's.'

'I absolutely agree with you, Frank,' Mrs Mildmay replied. 'And my most earnest hope is that our good old friend may come to see things in the right light with regard to her own family. This very conversation which I am urging may be a means of leading her to do so.'

Mrs Mildmay's courage would perhaps have failed her had she known what the 'conversation' she alluded to so lightly was really to consist of. It began by the most strenuous opposition on the old lady's side to the Barmettle plan. She had set her heart on Colonel Mildmay's accepting the post in London which was, according to her, 'the very thing to be desired for him.'

'You would be so near me,' she said. 'Any or all of you could come down at any time. Robin Redbreast would be your country home.'

Colonel Mildmay smiled gently while he thanked her, and then he reminded her of the overwhelming difference of the two appointments as regarded the 'pay.'

'But that needn't—that would not signify,' Lady Myrtle began, though with evident difficulty in expressing herself, while Mrs Mildmay's heart beat faster as she realised that they were approaching 'the tug of war.' 'I—you must know—it is only natural;' and with other confused expressions about Jacinth being to her 'as her own child,' 'no one of her own kith or kin except the Elvedons,' whose affairs were long ago definitely arranged, and references to her unforgotten devotion to the Jacinth of her youth, the old lady plunged into the thick of things. She had not meant to speak so soon, she said; she had wished her intentions to be faits accomplis before she disclosed them, but all this had upset her and she must explain.

And then she told the whole, and Colonel and Mrs Mildmay, though a little prepared for some announcement of proposed benefit to Jacinth in the future, listened in appalled and almost stunned silence to Lady Myrtle Goodacre's eccentric and, in their eyes, extravagant determination.

Jacinth was to be her heir—all that she had to dispose of, and it was still a great deal, even without that portion of her wealth which, with the knowledge that the old lord would have approved of her doing so, she meant to restore to the title; even shorn of that and of some other property on the Goodacre side which she only liferented, Lady Myrtle was a rich old woman. And all she had to leave, short of legacies to certain hospitals and other benevolent institutions which she had interested herself in, all was to be Jacinth's. The only landed property was Robin Redbreast and the small farm belonging to it, but in money there would be more than enough to keep up three or four places of its size.

Mrs Mildmay's heart sank, as she listened, but so far neither she nor her husband had interrupted the speaker by word or movement. And she, gaining confidence by their silence, at last came to the final announcement.

'So you see, my dear friends, that looking upon Jacinth as I do, it is only consistent—consistent, and I may say necessary—that you consent to my at once arranging for a proper allowance, whatever you like to call it, being arranged for her. And this—of course you will agree with me, that this must be an amount sufficient not only for a thoroughly good education, but for her to be surrounded by everything right and fitting for the position she will be called upon to occupy, perhaps not so very long hence, for I am an old woman. And I do not want to teach or induce any selfishness or self-assertion; I have the very greatest respect for parental authority; I will tell her nothing, or only what you approve of her knowing. But you see how it affects the present position of things, and your present decision, my dear Colonel Mildmay.'

Colonel Mildmay moved uneasily in his chair, but still he did not speak.

'You must see,' Lady Myrtle proceeded, 'that it would be entirely inconsistent in these circumstances for you to bury yourself and Eugenia and the children in a dreadful place like Barmettle. You will, I feel satisfied, agree that in anticipating the future a little, as it were, and allowing me at once to—to place a certain income at your disposal—an income which I am sure Jacinth will continue when things are in her own hands—you are only acting reasonably and—justly, I may say, as well as in a manner really to earn my gratitude.'

The old lady's voice trembled ominously: this strange continued silence was beginning to rouse some apprehension. As she uttered the last word—'gratitude'—Mrs Mildmay, hitherto entirely quiescent till her husband thought well to speak, could no longer restrain herself. She leant forward and caught Lady Myrtle's hand in hers.

'My dear, most kind friend,' she said, and her own voice was tremulous, 'how can you use such an expression? You grateful to us! Ah, no indeed; as long as we live we shall be at a loss how to show our gratitude to you.'

'Yes indeed,' said Colonel Mildmay. 'I do not know how to express my appreciation of all your goodness. I'——

'Then you consent,' exclaimed Lady Myrtle, her bright eyes sparkling. 'You will be my children; you will let me feel that my lonely life is to have some joy before its close.'

'Indeed, indeed, all we can do, we shall,' said Colonel Mildmay very gently. 'You cannot ask more affection than we are most ready to give. But'——He hesitated, and the look of eager satisfaction faded out of the old lady's face.

'But!' she repeated sharply. 'What "buts" can there be in so simple a matter?'

It was a distressing position. Colonel Mildmay, essentially a kind-hearted man and most averse to giving pain, felt it acutely. But he was not one to temporise. It was a case demanding the plainest speaking.

'My dear Lady Myrtle,' he said, 'if I am blunt or rough, forgive me. It is just this. I cannot agree to what I think wrong, and I could never feel it right to agree to what you propose. I am still young enough and strong enough to work for my family in my profession, and the day I began to lead an idle, or even a comparatively idle life, would see me a miserable man. If you are so good as to continue your interest in my children—Jacinth especially—by asking them to visit you sometimes, we shall be most grateful. If—if you like to leave Jacinth some little sum of money in your will which would help or increase any provision I can make for her, I would be foolish and ungracious in the extreme to object. But more than this—no, my dear friend, no. For—and here I must crave your pardon beforehand for what must seem impertinence and intrusion—not only have we, we Mildmays, no claim upon you, but—there are those who have.'



CHAPTER XVI.

A BITTER DISAPPOINTMENT.

There was an awful pause. Such at least it seemed to poor Mrs Mildmay, who, now that she was not called upon to act for herself, and felt under the protection of her husband, dared to tremble! Then came Lady Myrtle's reply, short, cold, and decisive.

'I deny it,' she said.

Colonel Mildmay did not speak.

The old lady glanced at him. His eyes were fixed on the table beside which he was seated; he tapped it lightly with a paper-cutter which he held in his hand. And after a moment's waiting she spoke again.

'I know what you refer to,' she said. 'It would be nonsense to pretend I do not. And I can—even—understand how to you it may seem that the claim you allude to exists. But, if you have talked together about these—these people, as no doubt you have done, has not Eugenia told you what I have told her, that on a certain day my father and I shook ourselves free from the bonds which had become shackles of shame; that from that time Bernard Harper and all belonging to him ceased to be more to us than any stranger we might brush against in the street?'

Colonel Mildmay raised his head and looked at her quietly.

'It could not be done; the bonds do exist and must exist,' he said. 'The great thing is that, however cruelly they may have torn and wounded you in the past, they may now be to you a cause of happiness and satisfaction.'

But Lady Myrtle shook her head.

'I will never acknowledge even the possibility of my recognising these descendants of my former brother as anything to me,' she said. And the quietness with which she spoke was very impressive. 'I have given them assistance because I believe them to be worthy people in sore need. I may even do so again if you tell me their need continues. But that is all. I should be false to my dead father if I did otherwise.

'Still, the late Lord Elvedon—your father, I mean—looked forward to his elder son's children being reinstated,' Colonel Mildmay ventured to say. 'Why then, in the actual circumstances of his younger grandchildren being to the full as worthy and in far greater need, why treat them so differently?'

Lady Myrtle hesitated, for half a second only, but even that was something.

'My father could not have contemplated the possibility of Bernard's descendants being—of their wiping out his disgrace,' she said at last confusedly.

'Exactly,' Colonel Mildmay replied quickly. 'And it was only natural. But as he did not contemplate a state of things which has actually come to pass, how can his directions affect you with regard to these facts?'

Lady Myrtle again shook her head. She had grown very pale, but otherwise she was completely self-controlled.

'I cannot argue in that way. I do not even pretend to be logical,' she said. 'I can only repeat—so it is. So now you understand. If I did not leave that part of my property which I conscientiously believe to be at my own disposal to the one I have chosen—the child who it seemed to me had been sent to brighten in some measure the loneliness of my old age;' and here her firm clear voice trembled, 'then—my will must stand as it is, and all destined for Jacinth, and in a sense for you yourselves, shall go to the two hospitals I have selected as the most worthy of help. I will have no compromises, no half measures.'

Colonel Mildmay bowed.

'Then let it be so,' he said. 'It is certainly not for me to dictate to you, dear Lady Myrtle.'

She seemed a little perplexed by his manner.

'Why should I give in to you?' she said inconsequently. 'Why should I not leave my fortune to Jacinth all the same? Why do you take for granted that I shall not do so? should she be punished for your—your obstinacy and quixotry?' and in spite of herself a smile crept over the old lady's face.

'I do not take it for granted,' said Colonel Mildmay. 'I know that you would not act towards Jacinth in such a way as to place her in opposition to her parents. I know that you respect our way of viewing the matter, however you may disagree with it.'

Lady Myrtle seemed mollified.

'You judge me rightly,' she said. 'If one feeling is stronger than another in me, it is respect for parental authority and influence. You are right. I would not so act to your child as to sow discord and disunion between her and those nearest and dearest to her after I am gone. But, let me ask you one thing—is your present decision quite irreversible?'