Her young father used to come round to the tall dingy house in the dull old square, when office hours were over, and sit beside the nursery fire, watching Mrs. Chichester, as she put the babies to bed, with an oft-repeated game with the ten bare pink toes of the child upon her knee.
His little daughter learned to know him, and to crow and laugh when he came into the nursery and held out his arms for her. He began to look forward to the time when she would learn to call him “Father,” but that was not to be.
Easter came late, in the spring following little Sydney’s birth, with hot sun and bitter winds.
Dr. Chichester had never had so many cases of pneumonia to attend, and one day a scrawl from Lord Francis’s lodgings told of illness there. He hurried round to find little Sydney’s father in high fever. There was from the first small chance of his recovery, as his strength was not sufficient to fight illness. He would have been altogether glad to go, if it had not been for the thought of his baby girl.
“My people cast me off completely,” he said, one day, when the end was near, “and they are not at all likely to receive my child.”
“My dear boy,” said the doctor, “don’t you worry. We couldn’t part with the little lassie now; if I would, my wife wouldn’t. Give her to us, and she shall be our child. She has our love already, and, God helping us! she shall have a happy home.”
“I can’t thank you,” Lord Francis had said hoarsely; and the doctor had said “Don’t!”
It was in his arms that Lord Francis died three days later.
Dr. Chichester had written to the poor boy’s eldest brother, who had now become the marquess, telling him that Frank was dying; but no notice had been taken of the letter. Lord Francis was laid beside his wife in the cemetery, and little Sydney grew from babyhood to childhood and from childhood to girlhood, with nothing but the difference of surname and the occasional telling of an old story with the saddest parts left out, to remind her that she was not a Chichester by birth.