first
attracted your dear father. 'It was,' he said--you know he always
expressed himself so remarkably--'such a sure sign of "race."' His own
people--oh! they were quite nice people--but quite middle-class." Again,
her hands and feet were smaller and more aristocratic than either Lydia's
or Susan's. She liked to remind herself constantly how everybody had
admired them and talked about them when she was a girl.

Drawing her work-box toward her, while she waited for Lydia's return,
Mrs. Penfold fell to knitting, while the inner chatter of the mind went
as fast as her needles--concerned chiefly with two matters of absorbing
interest: Lydia's twenty pounds, and a piece of news about Lydia,
recently learnt from the rector's wife.

As to the twenty pounds, it was the greatest blessing! Of course the
school salary would have been a certainty--and Lydia had hardly
considered it with proper seriousness. But there--all was well! The extra
twenty pounds would carry them on, and now that Lydia had begun to earn,
thought the maternal optimist, she would of course go on earning--at
higher and higher prices--and the family income of some three hundred a
year would obtain the increment it so desperately needed. And as Mrs.
Penfold looked upon a girls' school as something not far removed from a
nunnery, a place at any rate painfully devoid of the masculine element;
and as her whole mind was set--sometimes romantically, sometimes
financially--on the marriage of her daughters, she felt that both she and
Lydia had escaped what might have been an unfortunate necessity.

Yes, indeed!--what a _providential_ escape, if--

Mrs. Penfold let fall her knitting; her face sparkled. Why had Lydia
never communicated the fact, the thrilling fact that she had been meeting
at the rectory--more than once apparently--not merely _a_ young man, but
_the_ young man of the neighbourhood. And with results--favourable
results--quite evident to the Rector and the Rector's wife, if Lydia
herself chose to ignore and secrete them. It was really unkind....

The door opened. A white figure slipped into the room through its mingled
lights, and found a stool beside Mrs. Penfold.

"Dear--are you all right?"

Mrs. Penfold stroked the speaker's head.

"Well, I thought I was going to have a headache this morning,
darling--but I didn't--it went away. Lydia! the Rector and Mrs. Deacon
have been here. _Why_ didn't you tell me you have been meeting Lord
Tatham at the