“But you wanted the money, father,” she said, gently.

He looked at her swiftly, and a change came over his face, a look of caution, almost of cunning.

“Eh?  Yes, yes, of course I wanted it.  But he knew I should not have sold it for building on; that is why he got Bowden, the farmer, to buy it.  It was like him:  only such a man can be capable of such an underhand act.  And now I suppose he will be welcomed by his neighbours, and the Vaynes and the Bannerdales, and made much of.  They’ll eat his dinners, and their women will go to his balls and concerts—­they whose fathers would have refused to sit at the same table with him.  But there is one house at which he will not be welcome; one man who will not acknowledge him, who will not cross the threshold of Sir Stephen Orme’s brand-new palace, or invite him to enter his own.  He shall not darken the doors of Heron Hall.”

He rose as he spoke and left the room with a quicker step than usual.  But half an hour later when Ida went into the library she found him absorbed in his books as usual, and he only glanced up at her with absent, unseeing eyes, as she stood beside him putting on her gloves, her habit skirt caught up under her elbow, the old felt hat just a little askew on the soft, silky hair.

“Do you want anything before I go out, father?” she asked.

“No, no!” he replied abstractedly, and bending over his book again as he answered.  Ida crossed the hall in the sunlight, which lit up her beauty and made it seem a more striking contrast than usual to the dull and grim surroundings of the dark oak, the faded hangings and the lack-lustre armour, and Donald and Bess bounded, barking, before her down the terrace at which Jason was holding thy big chestnut.  The horse pricked up its ears and turned its head for her morning caress, the touch of the small, soft, but firm hand which it had come to regard as its due, and Ida sprang lightly from the last step into the saddle.  It was an informal way of mounting which few girls could have accomplished gracefully; but Ida did it as naturally and as easily as a circus rider, for the trick was a necessity to her who had so often to dismount and mount alone.

The lovely face was rather grave and thoughtful for some time after she had started, for the remembrance of last night weighed upon her, and her father’s unusual display of anger at breakfast troubled her vaguely; but, presently, after she had cleared a hedge and one of the broken rails, her spirits rose:  the sky was so blue, the sun so bright; it was hard to be depressed on such a morning.

She rode to a distant part of the dale where, in a rough meadow the steers were grazing; she surveyed them critically, chose those that should go to market, then turned, and leaping a bank, gained an ill-kept road.  A little farther on she came to an opening on the verge of the lake, and she pulled up, arrested by the great white house on the other side, which was literally glittering in the brilliant sunlight.  It certainly did not detract from the beauty of the view; in fact, it made the English lake look, for the moment, like an Italian one.