The Mating of Lydia

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

And besides—suppose—she made an impression on her father—on his cruel old heart? Such things do happen. It's silly to say they don't. "I am pretty—and now my clothes are all right—and my hands have come nearly white. He'll see I'm not a girl to be ashamed of. And if my father did give me a dot—why then I'd send my mother to his mother! That's how we'd do it in Italy. I'm as well-born as he—nearly—and if I had a dot—"

The yellow-haired girl at any rate was quite out of the way. No one spoke of her; no one mentioned her. That was all right.

And as to Threlfall and her father, if she was able to soften him at all it would not be in the least necessary to drive that bad young man, Mr. Faversham, to despair. Compromise—bargaining—settle most things. She fell to imagining—with a Latin clearness and realism—how it might be handled. Only it would have to be done before her father died. For if Mr. Faversham once took all the money and all the land, there would be no dot for her, even if he were willing to give it her. For Lord Tatham would never take a farthing from Mr. Faversham, not even through his wife. "And so it would be no use to me," thought Felicia, quietly, but regretfully.

Whitebeck station. Out she tripped, asked her way to Threlfall, and hurried off into the dark, followed by the curious looks of the station-master.

She was soon at the park gate, and passed through it with a beating heart. She had heard of the bloodhounds; and the sound of a bark in the distance—though it was only the collie at the farm—gave her a start of terror.

The Whitebeck gate was but a short distance from the house, and as she turned a corner, the Tower rose suddenly before her. She held her breath; it looked so big, so darkly magnificent. She thought of all the tales that had been told her, the rooms full of silver and gold—the arazzi—the stucchi—the cabinets and sculpture. She had grown up in an atmosphere of perpetual bric-a-brac; she had seen the big Florentine shops; she could imagine what it was like.

There were lights in two of the windows; and the smoke from several chimneys rose wind-beaten against the woods behind. The moon stood immediately over the roof, and the shadow of the house stretched beyond the forecourt almost to her feet.

She lingered a few minutes, fascinated, gazing at this huge place where her father lived—her father whom she had never seen since she was a baby. The moon lit up her tiny figure, and her small white face, as she stood in the open, alone in the wintry silence.

Then, swiftly, and instead of going up to the front door, she turned to the right along a narrow flagged path that skirted the forecourt and led to the back of the house.

She knew exactly what to do. She had planned it all with Hesketh, Hesketh, who was the daughter of a farmer on the Duddon estate, fifty years old, a born gossip, and acquainted with every man, woman and child in the neighbourhood. Did not Hesketh go to the same chapel with Thomas Dixon and his wife? And had she not a romantic soul, far above furbelows—a soul which had flung itself into the cause of the "heiress," to the point of keeping the child's secret, even from her ladyship? Hesketh indeed had suffered sharply from qualms of conscience in this respect. But Felicia had spared her as much as possible, by keeping the precise moment of her escapade to herself.