’Why, what a virago you are, Mary.  Well, I’m very glad it is not true.  Mr. Hammond is—­yes, I will be quite candid with you—­he is the only man I am ever likely to admire for his own sake.  He is good, brave, clever, all that you think him.  But you and I do not live in a world in which girls are free to follow their own inclinations.  I should break Lady Maulevrier’s heart if I were to make a foolish marriage; and I owe her too much to set her wishes at naught, or to make her declining years unhappy.  I must obey her, at any cost to my own feelings.  Please never mention Mr. Hammond’s name.  I’m sure I’ve had quite enough unhappiness about him.’

‘I see,’ said Mary, bitterly.  ’It is your own pain you think of, not his.  He may suffer, so long as you are not worried.’

‘You are an impertinent chit,’ retorted Lesbia, ’and you know nothing about it.’

After this there was no more said about Mr. Hammond; but Mary did not forget him.  She wrote long letters to her brother, who was still in Scotland, shooting, deer-stalking, fishing, killing something or other daily, in the most approved fashion of an Englishman taking his pleasure.  Maulevrier occasionally repaid her with a telegram; but he was not a good correspondent.  He declared that life was too short for letter-writing.

Summer was gone; the lake was no longer a shining emerald floor, dotted with the reflection of the flock upon the verdant slopes above it, but dull and grey of hue, and broken by white-edged wavelets.  Patches of snow gleamed on the misty heights of Helvellyn, and the autumn winds howled and shrieked around Fellside in the evenings, when all the shutters were shut, and the outside world seemed little more than an idea:  that mystic hour when the sheep are slumbering under the starry sky, and when, as the Westmoreland peasant believes, the fairies help the housewife at her spinning-wheel.

Those October evenings were very long and weary for Lesbia and her sister.  Lady Maulevrier read and mused in her low chair beside the fire, with her books piled upon her own particular table, and lighted by her own particular lamp.  She talked very little, but she was always gracious to her granddaughters and their governess, and she liked them to be with her in the evening.  Lesbia played or sang, or sat at work at her basket-table, which occupied the other side of the fireplace; and Fraeulein and Mary had the rest of the room to themselves, as it were, those two places by the hearth being sacred, as if dedicated to household gods.  Mary read immensely in those long evenings, devouring volume after volume, feeding her imagination with every kind of nutriment, good, bad, and indifferent.  Fraeulein Mueller knitted a woollen shawl, which seemed to have neither beginning, middle, nor end, and was always ready for conversation, but there were times when silence brooded over the scene for long intervals, and when every sound of the light wood-ashes dropping on the tiled hearth was distinctly audible.