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little outcast's hand. Cynthia had carefully hidden the coin away; she
was resolved never to spend it. She took it out and looked at it
sometimes, feeling, though she could not have put her feelings into
words, that it was an actual visible sign of some one's kindness of
heart, of some one's love and pity for her. And the other thing was the
dark melancholy face of the man who had brought her to the Rectory, and
told her to be good for her father's sake.

She liked to think of his face best of all. It was one that she was sure
she would never forget. She brooded over it with silent adoration, with
a simple faith and confidence in the goodness of its owner, which would
have cut him to the heart if he had ever dreamed of it. He had been kind
to her; that was all she knew. She rewarded him by the devotion of her
whole being. It was surely a great reward for such a little act! She did
not know that it was he who was to pay for her going to school, that it
was he who had rescued her from the degradation of her outcast life.

Mrs. Rumbold kept her word to Hubert. She talked vaguely in Cynthia's
presence of "kind friends" who were doing "so much" for her; but Cynthia
associated the idea of "kind friends" with that of Mrs. Rumbold herself,
and was not grateful. The child was not old enough, and had been too
much stunned by the various experiences of her little life, to be very
curious. She did not know Mr. Lepel by name, or why he should be at
Beechfield at all. He did not often visit the Vanes, although he saw a
good deal of his aunt Leonora in London. He was quite a stranger to half
the people in the village.

Also, Cynthia's father, now in prison for the murder of Sydney Vane, had
not lived long in Beechfield, and did not know the history and
relationships of the Squire's family, as natives of Beechfield were
supposed to do. He had been two years in the village, and had rented a
tumbledown ruinous cottage by the side of a marshy pond, which no one
else would occupy. Here he had lived a lonely life, gathering rushes
from the pond and weaving baskets out of them, doing a day's work in the
fields now and then, setting snares for rabbits, trapping foxes, and
killing game--a man suspected by the authorities, shunned by the village
respectabilities, avoided by even those wilder spirits who met at the
"Blue Lion" to talk of bullocks and to drink small-beer. For he was not
of a genial disposition. He was gruff and surly in speec