'I know,' said Jacinth, 'that Lady Myrtle likes things one way or another. I suppose she will give us up altogether now. I suppose she will leave off caring anything about me. You think very badly of me, papa, I can see; you think me mercenary and selfish and everything horrid; but—it wasn't only for myself, and it isn't only because of what she was doing for us, and meant to do for us. I have got to love Lady Myrtle very much, and I shall feel dreadfully the never seeing her any more, and—and'——

Here, not altogether to her mother's distress, Jacinth broke down and began to sob bitterly. Mrs Mildmay got up from her seat, and came close to where the girl was sitting by the table.

'My poor dear child,' she said, 'we have never thought you selfish in that sort of way.'

'No,' agreed her father; 'that you may believe. You have had of late too much responsibility thrown upon you, and it has given you the feeling that the whole fortunes of your family depended upon you in some sense. Be content to be a child a little longer, my Jacinth, and to trust your parents. And there is no need for you to anticipate any change with Lady Myrtle. She will care for you, and for us all, as much as ever—more perhaps; and as much time as it will be right for you to spend away from your own home, you shall have our heartiest consent to spending with her. If you can in any way give her pleasure—and I know you can—it will be the very least we can do in return for her really wonderful goodness to us.'

'I should like to see her; to be with her sometimes,' said Jacinth, whose sobs had now calmed down into quiet crying. 'But I don't want—once we go away to that place—I don't want ever to see Robin Redbreast again. Ever since'—and here she had to stop a moment—'ever since that first day when we passed it with Uncle Marmy, I have had a sort of feeling to this house—a kind of presentiment. I can't bear to think of its going to strangers, or—or people that know nothing about Lady Myrtle. And very likely, if she leaves all she has to big hospitals or something like that, very likely this place will be sold.'

'It may be so,' said Colonel Mildmay; and he added with a smile, 'I wish for your sake I were rich enough to buy it, my poor dear child.'

So Jacinth's castles in the air were somewhat rudely destroyed. There was but one consolation to her. Lady Myrtle was even more loving than hitherto, though she said nothing about the collapse of her plans. For Mrs Mildmay gave her to understand that matters, so far as was fitting, had been explained to her elder daughter.

'Humph!' said the old lady. 'That seals my lips. For of course I cannot express disapproval of her parents to the child.'

But her tenderness and marked affection went some way to soothe the smarting of the girl's sore feelings.

'She understands me far better than papa and mamma do,' thought Jacinth. 'If they meant me to see everything through their eyes, they shouldn't have left me away from them all these years.'