en looked affrighted. "It's too much, miss. An'
coals eighteen pence a hundred!"

"Never mind," said her ladyship's sister, and the old woman, looking up
into her eyes, found there the colour Mount Dunstan had thought of as
being that of bluebells under water. "I think we can manage it, Mrs.
Welden. Keep yourself as warm as you like, and sometime I will come and
have a cup of tea with you and see if the tea is good."

"Oh! Deary me!" said Mrs. Welden. "I can't think what to say, miss. It
lifts everythin'--everythin'. It's not to be believed. It's like bein'
left a fortune."

When the wicket gate swung to and the young lady went up the lane, the
old woman stood staring after her. And here was a piece of news to run
into Charley Jenkins' cottage and tell--and what woman or man in the row
would quite believe it?

CHAPTER XXV

"WE BEGAN TO MARRY THEM, MY GOOD FELLOW!"

Lord Dunholm and his eldest son, Lord Westholt, sauntered together
smoking their after-dinner cigars on the broad-turfed terrace
overlooking park and gardens which seemed to sweep without boundary
line into the purplish land beyond. The grey mass of the castle stood
clear-cut against the blue of a sky whose twilight was still almost
daylight, though in the purity of its evening stillness a star already
hung, here and there, and a young moon swung low. The great spaces about
them held a silence whose exquisite entirety was marked at intervals
by the distant bark of a shepherd dog driving his master's sheep to
the fold, their soft, intermittent plaints--the mother ewes' mellow
answering to the tender, fretful lambs--floated on the air, a lovely
part of the ending day's repose. Where two who are friends stroll
together at such hours, the great beauty makes for silence or for
thoughtful talk. These two men--father and son--were friends and
intimates, and had been so from Westholt's first memory of the time when
his childish individuality began to detach itself from the background of
misty and indistinct things. They had liked each other, and their liking
and intimacy had increased with the onward moving and change of years.
After sixty sane and decently spent active years of life, Lord Dunholm,
in either country tweed or evening dress, was a well-built and handsome
man; at thirty-three his son was still like him.

"Have you seen her?" he was saying.

"Only at a distance. She was driving Lady Anstruthers across the marshes
in a cart. She drove well a