“Wrong! It would be infamous.”
“Would God be angry?” asked the child, with an awe-stricken look. “Would it be wicked?”
“It would be the worst possible insult to me,” said Lord Castle-Connell’s daughter, ignoring the minor question.
After this Mildred refrained from all further speech about the absent girl to her mother; but as the years went by she questioned her father from time to time as to Fay’s whereabouts.
“She is very well off, my dear. You need not make yourself unhappy about her. She is with a very nice family, and has pleasant surroundings.”
“Shall I never see her again, father?”
“Never’s a long day, Mildred. I’ll take you to see her by and by when there is an opportunity. You see, it happens unfortunately that your mother does not like her, so it is better she should not come here. It would not be pleasant for her—or for me.”
He said this gravely, with a somewhat dejected look, and Mildred felt somehow that even to him it would be better to talk no more of her lost companion.
As the years went by Mrs. Fausset changed from a woman of fashion to a nervous valetudinarian. It was not that she loved pleasure less, but her beauty and her health had both begun to dwindle and fade at an age when other women are in their prime. She fretted at the loss of her beauty—watched every wrinkle, counted every gray hair, lamented over every change in the delicate colouring which had been her chief charm.
“How pretty you are growing, Mildred!” she exclaimed once, with a discontented air, when Mildred was a tall slip of fourteen. “You are just what I was at your age. And you will grow prettier every day until you are thirty, and then I daresay you will begin to fade as I have done, and feel an old woman as I do.”