d they were not given her. Instead
the figure of Melrose rose on the horizon, till he dominated the
correspondence, a harsh and fantastic task-master, to whose will and
conscience it was useless to appeal.

When two months of this double correspondence had gone by, and in the
absence of Lydia's usual friends and correspondents from the Pengarth
neighbourhood, no other information from the north had arrived to
supplement Faversham's letters, Susy, who was in the Tyrol with a friend,
might have drawn ample "copy," from her sister's condition, had she
witnessed it. Lydia was most clearly unhappy. She was desperately
interested, and full of pity; yet apparently powerless to help. There
was a tug at her heart, a grip on her thoughts, which increased
perpetually. Faversham wrote to her often like a guilty man; why, she
could not imagine. The appeal of his letters to her had begun to shake
her nerves, to haunt her nights. She longed for the October day when
Green Cottage would be free from its tenants, and she once more on the
spot.

With the second week of October, Lady Tatham returned to Duddon. Tatham
would have been with her, but that he was detained, grumbling, by a
political demonstration at Newcastle. Never had he felt political
speech-making so tedious. But for a foolish promise to talk drivel to a
crowd of people who knew even less about the subject than he, he might
have been spending the evening with Lydia. For the strangers in Green
Cottage had departed, and Lydia was again within his reach.

The return to Duddon after an absence had never lost its freshness for
Victoria. Woman of fifty as she was, she was still a bundle of passions,
in the intellectual and poetic sense. The sight of her own fells and
streams, the sound of the Cumbrian "aa's," and "oo's," the scurrying of
the sheep among the fern, the breath of the wind in the Glendarra woods,
the scent of moss and heather--these things rilled her with just the same
thrills and gushes of delight as in her youth. Such thrills and gushes
were for her own use only; she never offered them for inspection by other
people.

She had no sooner looked at her letters, and chatted with her
housekeeper, on the day of her return, than clothed in her oldest gown
and thickest shoes, she went out wandering by herself through the October
dusk; ravished by the colour in which autumn had been wrapping the
Cumbrian earth since she had beheld it last; the purples and golds and
amet