CHAPTER II.
A NEW LORD.
Sir William Chester came home to England to die. He had felt it when leaving India; he had felt it on the voyage, and he had become assured of it ere long after he had reached the fatherland.
He had made no movement towards ejecting his tenant from Leyburn Abbey. He had found rest and shelter at Allerdale, and had very soon come to love the old earl as he would have loved a father.
And the earl had quickly learned to love him. It had not needed the good word of his son. His own heart had found the lovable man; and love had been given without stint.
And the little Cordelia, now completing her twelfth year—she was like a ray of blessed sunlight in the old castle.
She was a plump little thing, bright and winsome, her silken locks giving promise of a rich golden brown; her large gray eyes, like twin stars, full of laughter and full of warm, impulsive love.
Where she loved she would love with all her heart; and strange as it may appear, her first and warmest love was given to the old earl—“Gran’pa,” she called him, with her two dimpled arms round his neck and her rosy lips pressed upon his cheek.
And the love that Lord Allerdale gave to the bright-faced little girl became part of his very life. He could not, after a time, bear to have her away from him.
He held her on his knee; he carried her in his arms; he led her in the court and in the park, and he played with her; in short, in her society he renewed, not his youth, but his very childhood. What a happy old man he was when the little child had him in full subjection.