trees--behind it, she knew, was Threlfall Tower. Her father--her unkind,
miserly father, who hated both her and her mother--lived there.

How far was it? A long way! But she would get there somehow.

"It is my right to see my father!" she said to herself passionately;
adding with a laugh which swept away heroics, "After all, he might take a
fancy to me in these clothes!"

And she looked down complacently on the pretty tailor-made skirt and
the new shoes that showed beneath Victoria's fur cloak. In less than
a fortnight her own ambition and the devotion of Victoria's maid,
Hesketh, only too delighted to dress somebody so eager to be dressed, for
whom the mere operations of the toilette possessed a kind of religious
joy, on whom, moreover, "clothes" in the proper and civilized sense of
the word, sat so amazingly well--had turned the forlorn little drudge
into a figure more than creditable to the pains lavished upon her.
Felicia aimed high. The thought and trouble which the young lady had
spent, since her arrival, on her hair, her hands, and the minor points of
English manners, not to mention the padding and plumping of her small
person--which in spite of all her efforts, however, remained of a most
sylphlike slimness--by a generous diet of cream and butter, only she and
Hesketh knew. Victoria guessed, and felt a new and most womanish pleasure
in the details of her transformation. She realized, poignantly, how
pleasant it would have been to dress and spoil a daughter.

All the more, as Felicia, after a first eager grasping at pretty things,
as a child holds out covetous hands for toys and sweets, had shown sudden
scruples, an unexpected and pretty recoil.

"Don't give me so many things!" she had said, almost with a stamp, the
sudden, astonishing tears in her great eyes; when, after the first week,
the new clothes began to shower upon her. "I can't help wanting them! I
adore them! But I won't be a beggar--no! You will think we only came here
for this--to get things out of you. We didn't--we _didn't_.'"

"My dear, won't you give me the pleasure?" Victoria had said,
shamefacedly, putting out a hand to stroke the girl's hair. Whereupon
Felicia had thrown herself impulsively on her knees, with her arms round
the speaker, and there had been a mingled moment of laughter and emotion
which had left Victoria very much astonished at herself, and given
Hesketh a free hand. Victoria's solitary pursuits, the awkward or stately
rese