‘I’d give a trifle,’ thought Jasper, ‘to know how many throbs to the minute the governor’s pulse is giving just now. I suppose, like a pattern guardian, he will receive her in the hall. I’ll wait till the first disjointed welcomes are over, and then drop in and inspect the new importation. I wonder if she drinks rum, like her brother?’

The captain had drawn, mentally, a fancy portrait of Hold’s sister, and had marvelled how Blanche and Lucy would be likely to get on with such a one as she could scarcely fail to be. But at the very first glance Jasper abandoned as untenable the conjecture that Miss Willis could drink rum, and he owned to himself, with the candour which men of his stamp exhibit in self-communing alone, how very wide of the mark was the likeness which his imagination had traced.

Miss Willis was very short and slight, and the deep mourning which she wore made her look even slighter and shorter than she really was. She had jet black hair that curled naturally, which, as if in ignorance or defiance of fashion, she wore in a crop, and which made the whiteness of her skin seem more conspicuous than it would otherwise have done. A pale little face, lit up by a pair of fine dark eyes, that drooped modestly to the carpet, as suitable to her shy, timid air. Whether she were pretty or the reverse, was not to be so summarily settled as is the case with most of her sex.

It was the eyes, and the eyes alone, that lent a marked peculiarity to the countenance of Sir Sykes’s ward. Look at them, and the verdict that Miss Willis was charming would have been pronounced by many women and most men. Confine the scrutiny to the other features, and the judgment that the Indian orphan was a plain, pale little creature, would as inevitably have resulted. She looked young, quite a girl. The delicate smoothness of her cheek suggested that her age might be under twenty; but there was a subdued thoughtfulness in her aspect that might have harmonised well with her years, had she been older by a lustrum.

‘I was talking of Œdipus,’ such was Jasper’s soliloquy after a half-hour spent in the new arrival’s company; ‘but here is the Sphynx herself, by Jove!’

It was with an inexpressible sentiment of relief that the baronet saw what style of person his ward appeared to be. Here were no solecisms in breeding, no coarseness of tone, or affectations more painful than honest roughness ever is, to wince at, to gloss over, to excuse on the ground of a youth spent in a far country, and often in stations where European society was scarce, and perhaps not always choice as regarded its quality. Sir Sykes had reckoned, at best, on a probationary period during which he should have had to play the irksome part of an apologist for the shortcomings of her whom he had invited to be the companion of his own daughters.

But Sir Sykes and Jasper, too, were forced to admit that Miss Willis was either an actress of consummate address, or, what really seemed the more probable, was merely appearing in her genuine character. Timid and somewhat constrained, but not awkward, was her manner of responding to the warm greeting of Sir Sykes’s two daughters and to the grave urbanity of the baronet himself. She did not say much; but her voice trembled when she thanked Sir Sykes for his ‘extreme kindness’ to a stranger like herself. Then Blanche kissed her. She should not be a stranger long, she said. And then the girl broke down, sobbing. ‘How good you all are to me,’ she said. ‘I hope—I do hope not to be very troublesome, not to’——

And then there were more tears and more kissing; and the Misses Denzil took complete possession of their new friend, and bore her off to be installed in her room, and to learn to be at home at Carbery. Nothing could have gone off better than the orphan’s reception; and even Jasper felt this, and forbore to sneer. His own heart was as hard as the nether millstone; but he accepted the fact that his sisters possessed organs of a different degree of sensibility, precisely as he owned that roses had perfume, and that the thrushes and nightingales sang sweetly in the garden.

‘She’s no more the sister of yonder pirate fellow,’ such was the captain’s conclusion, ‘than the last Derby winner was a drayhorse. I thought the rascal spoke mockingly of the relationship between her and him. No; she’s not Hold’s sister. I wonder whether she is mine?’

In the course of the afternoon of that day, Lord Harrogate, who had ridden over from High Tor, made his appearance. There was, as has been mentioned, a frequent exchange of neighbourly communications between the two great houses of the vicinity. The Earl, it is true, seldom called upon Sir Sykes, and Sir Sykes as seldom on the Earl; but the Countess was often at Carbery, and the young people of both families were much in each other’s company. By the time of Lord Harrogate’s visit, the girl from India had made considerable progress in winning the good-will of the Misses Denzil, prepossessed in her favour from the beginning. They had devoted the time since luncheon to shewing her the lions of Carbery—the tapestry of the ‘Queen’s Chamber,’ faded but sumptuous; the stained glass; the chapel; the pictures; the grand conservatory, built by a former lord of Carbery, on a scale too ambitious for the use of a private family, and which was kept up at a cost which even Sir Sykes murmured at; and the other local curiosities.