d called Elfride a little scamp for
surreptitiously preserving some blind kittens that ought to have been
drowned. After this expression, she said to him suddenly:

'If Mr. Smith had been already in the family, you would not have been
made wretched by discovering he had poor relations?'

'Do you mean in the family by marriage?' he replied inattentively, and
continuing to peel his egg.

The accumulating scarlet told that was her meaning, as much as the
affirmative reply.

'I should have put up with it, no doubt,' Mr. Swancourt observed.

'So that you would not have been driven into hopeless melancholy, but
have made the best of him?'

Elfride's erratic mind had from her youth upwards been constantly in
the habit of perplexing her father by hypothetical questions, based on
absurd conditions. The present seemed to be cast so precisely in
the mould of previous ones that, not being given to syntheses of
circumstances, he answered it with customary complacency.

'If he were allied to us irretrievably, of course I, or any sensible
man, should accept conditions that could not be altered; certainly not
be hopelessly melancholy about it. I don't believe anything in the world
would make me hopelessly melancholy. And don't let anything make you so,
either.'

'I won't, papa,' she cried, with a serene brightness that pleased him.

Certainly Mr. Swancourt must have been far from thinking that the
brightness came from an exhilarating intention to hold back no longer
from the mad action she had planned.

In the evening he drove away towards Stratleigh, quite alone. It was
an unusual course for him. At the door Elfride had been again almost
impelled by her feelings to pour out all.

'Why are you going to Stratleigh, papa?' she said, and looked at him
longingly.

'I will tell you to-morrow when I come back,' he said cheerily; 'not
before then, Elfride. Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know, and
so far will I trust thee, gentle Elfride.'

She was repressed and hurt.

'I will tell you my errand to Plymouth, too, when I come back,' she
murmured.

He went away. His jocularity made her intention seem the lighter, as his
indifference made her more resolved to do as she liked.

It was a familiar September sunset, dark-blue fragments of cloud upon an
orange-yellow sky. These sunsets used to tempt her to walk towards them,
as any beautiful thing tempts a near approach. She went through the
field to the privet hedge, clam