“You have never seen my cousin before?” she inquired.

“Lady Dunstable?  Is she your cousin?”

Miss Field nodded.  “My first cousin.  And I spend a great part of the year here, helping in different ways.  Rachel can’t do without me now, so I’m able to keep her in order.  Don’t ever be shy with her!  Don’t ever let her think she frightens you!—­those are the two indispensable rules here.”

“I’m afraid I should break them,” said Doris, slowly.  “She does frighten me—­horribly!”

“Ah, well, you didn’t show it—­that’s the chief thing.  You know she’s a much more human creature than she seems.”

“Is she?” Doris’s eyes pursued the two distant figures in the park.

“You’d think, for instance, that Lord Dunstable was just a cipher?  Not at all.  He’s the real authority here, and when he puts his foot down Rachel always gives in.  But of course she’s stood in the way of his career.”

Doris shrank a little from these indiscretions.  But she could not keep her curiosity out of her eyes, and Miss Field smilingly answered it.

“She’s absorbed him so!  You see he watches her all the time.  She’s like an endless play to him.  He really doesn’t care for anything else—­he doesn’t want anything else.  Of course they’re very rich.  But he might have done something in politics, if she hadn’t been so much more important than he.  And then, naturally, she’s made enemies—­powerful enemies.  Her friends come here of course—­her old cronies—­the people who can put up with her.  They’re devoted to her.  And the young people—­the very modern ones—­who think nice manners ‘early Victorian,’ and like her rudeness for the sake of her cleverness.  But the rest!—­What do you think she did at one of these parties last year?”

Doris could not help wishing to know.

“She took a fancy to ask a girl near here—­the daughter of a clergyman, a great friend of Lord Dunstable’s, to come over for the Sunday.  Lord Dunstable had talked of the girl, and Rachel’s always on the look-out for cleverness; she hunts it like a hound!  She met the young woman too somewhere, and got the impression—­I can’t say how—­that she would ‘go.’  So on the Saturday morning she went over in her pony-carriage—­broke in on the little Rectory like a hurricane—­of course you know the people about here regard her as something semi-divine!—­and told the girl she had come to take her back to Crosby Ledgers for the Sunday.  So the poor child packed up, all in a flutter, and they set off together in the pony-carriage—­six miles.  And by the time they had gone four Rachel had discovered she had made a mistake—­that the girl wasn’t clever, and would add nothing to the party.  So she quietly told her that she was afraid, after all, the party wouldn’t suit her.  And then she turned the pony’s head, and drove her straight home again!”

“Oh!” cried Doris, her cheeks red, her eyes aflame.

“Brutal, wasn’t it?” said the other.  “All the same, there are fine things in Rachel.  And in one point she’s the most vulnerable of women!”