“No, I can’t stay,” he said in answer to her invitation.  “I have to be back at the office; but I’ll ride a little way with you, if I may.  It isn’t often I get the chance of riding with the prettiest girl in the county.  There now, I’ve made you blush, as I used to when you sat upon my knee, and I told you that little girls had no right to stars for eyes.”

Ida laughed.

“But I’m a big girl now,” she said, “and too old for compliments; besides, lawyers should always speak the truth.”

“For goodness sake! don’t spread that theory, my dear, or we shall all have to put our shutters up,” he retorted, with mock alarm.

He got on his old red-roan rather stiffly, and they rode out of the court-yard and on to the road, where, be sure, Ida’s “star-like” eyes swept the hills and the valleys lest perchance a young man should be riding there.  They rode in silence for a few minutes, during which the old lawyer seemed very thoughtful, and glanced at her sideways, as if he were trying to make up his mind about something.  At last he said, with an affectation of casualness: 

“Father been pretty well of late, my dear?”

Ida hesitated for a moment.  She could not bring herself to tell even Mr. Wordley of her father’s painful habit of walking in his sleep.

“Yes,” she said, “fairly well.  Sometimes he is rather restless and irritable as if he were worried.  Has he anything to worry him, Mr. Wordley—­I mean anything more than usual?”

He did not answer, and she looked at him as if waiting for his reply.

“I was thinking of what you just said:  that you were a big girl.  So you are, though you always seem to me like the little child I used to nurse.  But the world rolls on and you have grown into a woman and I ought to tell you the truth,” he said, at last.

“The truth!” she echoed, with a quick glance.

“Yes,” he said, nodding gravely.  “Does your father ever talk to you of business, my dear?  I know that you manage the house and the farm; ay, and manage them well, but I don’t know whether he ever tells you anything about the business of the estate.  I ask because I am in rather an awkward position.  When your father dismissed his steward I thought he would consult me on the matters which the steward used to manage; but he has not done so, and I am really more ignorant about his affairs than anyone would credit, seeing that I have been the Herons’ family lawyer—­I and mine—­since, well, say, since the Flood.”  “No; my father tells me nothing,” said Ida.  “Is there anything the matter, is there anything I should know?”

He looked at her gravely, compassionately.

“My dear, I think there is,” he said.  “If you had a brother or any relative near you I would not worry you, would not tell you.  But you have none, you are quite alone, you see.”

“Quite alone,” she echoed.  And then she blushed, as she remembered Stafford, and that she was no longer alone in the world.