'People said that a great lady like Lady Fettercairn would not permit one like me to have pets, and so—and so I gave him to our curate, dear old Mr. Pentreath. Oh, how the bird sang as I was leaving him!'
'Poor Miss Carlyon?' said Finella, touched by the girl's sweet and childlike simplicity.
For a moment—but a moment only—Dulcie was struck by the painful contrast between her own fate and position in life, and those of the brilliant Finella Melfort, and with it came a keen sense of inequality and injustice; but Finella, fortunately for herself, was an heiress of money, and not—as Lord Fettercairn often reminded her—an unlucky landed proprietor, in these days of starving crofters, failing tenants, Irish assassinations, and agricultural collapses, with defiant notices of impossibility to pay rent, and clamours for reduction thereof. She was heiress to nothing of that sort, but solid gold shaken from the Rupee Tree.
When the ladies withdrew to the drawing-room, Dulcie gladly accompanied them, instead of retiring (as perhaps Lady Fettercairn expected) to her own apartment; we say gladly, as she was as much afraid of the society of Shafto as he was of hers—and she had a great dread she scarcely knew of what.
How, if this cold, stately, and aristocratic lady, to whom she now owed her bread, and whose paid dependant she was, should discover that Shafto, the recovered 'grandson,' had ever made love to her once upon a time in her Devonshire home?
Dulcie, as it was her first experience of Craigengowan, did not sink into her position there, by withdrawing first, and, more than all, silently. She effusively shook hands with everyone in a kindly country fashion, but withdrew her slender fingers from Shafto's eager clasp with a haughty movement that Lady Fettercairn detected, and with some surprise and some anger, too; but to which she did not give immediate vent.
'Her hair is unpleasantly red,' said she to Finella after a time.
'Nay, grandmamma,' replied the latter; 'I should call it golden—and what a lovely skin she has!'
'Red I say her hair is; and she looks ill.'
'Well, even if it is, she couldn't help her hair, unless she dyed it; besides, she is in mourning for her father, poor thing, and has had a long, long journey. No one looks well after that—and she travelled third-class she told me, poor girl.'