terrogation on the
subject of Lydia, both as to the present and the past. Was she still in
correspondence with Faversham, as Victoria now understood from Tatham she
had been all the summer? Was she still defending him? Perhaps engaged to
him? For a fair-minded and sensible woman, Victoria fell into strange
bogs of prejudice and injustice in the course of these ponderings.

In her drives and walks at this time, Victoria generally avoided the
neighbourhood of the cottage. But one afternoon at the very end of
October, she overtook--walking--a slight, muffled figure in the Whitebeck
road, and recognized Susy Penfold. A constrained greeting passed between
them, and Lady Tatham learnt that Lydia was away--had been away, indeed,
since the day following her last interview with Harry. The very next
morning she and her mother had been summoned to London by the grave
illness of Mrs. Penfold's elder sister. And there they were still; though
Lydia was expected home shortly.

Victoria walked on, with relieved feelings, she scarcely knew why. At any
rate there had been no personal contact between Faversham and a charming
though foolish girl, during these weeks of popular indignation.

By what shabby arts had the mean and grasping fellow now installed at
Threlfall ever succeeded in obtaining a hold over a being so refined, so
fastidious and--to all appearances--so high-minded, as Lydia Penfold?
To refuse Harry and decline on Claude Faversham! Victoria acknowledged
indeed a certain pseudo-Byronic charm in the man. She could not forget
the handsome head as she had seen it last at the door of Melrose's
library; or the melodramatic black and white of the face, of the small,
peaked beard, the dark brows, pale lantern cheeks, and heavy-lidded eyes.
All the picturesque adventurers of the world betray something, she
thought, of a common stamp.

At last one evening, when Tatham was away on county business, and Felicia
had gone to bed, Victoria suddenly unburdened herself to Cyril Boden, as
they sat one on either side of a November fire, while a southwesterly
gale from the high fells blustered and raged outside.

Boden was the confessor of a good many people. Not that he was by any
means an orthodox Christian; his ascetic ways had very little to do with
any accepted form of doctrine. But there was in him the natural priestly
power, which the priest by ordination may have or miss. It was because
men and women realized in himself the presence