“My little girl,” mother was speaking, with a gentle hand on the untidy brown head on her knee, “my poor little girl!”
Sydney lifted up her piteous face.
“Oh, mother, you will let me stay your little girl! I can’t go away. Oh, mother, you always said I was given to you!”
Dr. Chichester blew his nose violently, and came and sat down beside his wife.
“See here, my little Sydney,” he said. “God knows you can’t cease to be our child to us, as you have been for these seventeen years. If it were acting rightly to keep you, do you suppose your mother and I could consent to let our little girl go from us? Still, we have got to do the right thing; and when your poor young father gave you to us, he had no idea of your ever coming near the title. But now this accident to your cousin, Lord St. Quentin, makes you heiress to it, so your cousin’s man of business writes to tell me. Lord St. Quentin wants you, and, my little girl, you must go.”
“Couldn’t I say I don’t want to be a marchioness?” poor Sydney asked despairingly; “isn’t there anybody else to be one instead?”
Dr. Chichester shook his grey head sadly; Mr. Fenton’s letter had been clear enough on that point. There was a complete failure of heirs male: and, in the House of Lisle, the female had the power, in such a case, to inherit land and title.
Dr. Chichester knew this as a fact, though he had thought about it very little. There had been nothing to bring it very prominently before him in the seventeen years that had passed since he promised to be a father to the little motherless daughter of his dying patient, Lord Francis Lisle.
The doctor had come across many sad things in the course of his professional experience, but nothing much sadder than the sight he had seen one cold December day in the little bare bedroom of a miserable lodging-house off Pentonville. He was attending the more urgent cases of a sick friend, and in this way came across Lord Francis and his girl wife. She was lying in the meagre bed, with her young husband fanning her, and a tiny wailing baby at her side.