’And then, dearest, I hope you will make up your mind to spend the season in London,’ wrote Lesbia.  ’I shall expect to hear that you have secured Lord Porlock’s house.  How dreadfully slow your poor dear hand is to recover!  I am afraid Horton is not treating the case cleverly.  Why do you not send for Mr. Erichsen?  It is a shock to my nerves every time I receive a letter in Mary’s masculine hand, instead of in your lovely Italian penmanship.  Strange—­isn’t it?—­how much better the women of your time write than the girls of the present day!  Lady Kirkbank receives letters from stylish girls in a hand that would disgrace a housemaid.’

Lady Maulevrier allowed a post to go by before she answered this letter, while she deliberated upon the best and wisest manner of arranging her granddaughter’s future.  It was an agony to her not to be able to write with her own hand, to be obliged to so shape every sentence that Mary might learn nothing which she ought not to know.  It was impossible with such an amanuensis to write confidentially to Lady Kirkbank.  The letters to Lesbia were of less consequence; for Lesbia, albeit so intensely beloved, was not in her grandmother’s confidence, least of all about those schemes and dreams which concerned her own fate.

However, the letters had to be written, so Mary was told to open her desk and begin.

The letter to Lesbia ran thus:—­

    ’My dearest Child,

’This is a world in which our brightest day-dreams generally end in mere dreaming.  For years past I have cherished the hope of presenting you to your sovereign, to whom I was presented six and forty years ago, when she was so fair and girlish a creature that she seemed to me more like a queen in a fairy tale than the actual ruler of a great country.  I have beguiled my monotonous days with thoughts of the time when I should return to the great world, full of pride and delight in showing old friends what a sweet flower I had reared in my mountain home; but, alas, Lesbia, it may not be.

’Fate has willed otherwise.  The maimed hand does not recover, although Horton is very clever, and thoroughly understands my case.  I am not ill, I am not in danger; so you need feel no anxiety about me; but I am a cripple; and I am likely to remain a cripple for months; so the idea of a London season this year is hopeless.

’Now, as you have in a manner made your debut at Cannes, it would never do to bury you here for another year.  You complained of the dullness last summer; but you would find Fellside much duller now that you have tasted the elixir of life.  No, my dear love, it will be well for you to be presented, as Lady Kirkbank proposes, at the first drawing-room after Easter; and Lady Kirkbank will have to present you.  She will be pleased to do this, I know, for her letters are full of enthusiasm about you.  And, after all, I do not think you will lose by the exchange.