“As to the right-of-way business, Melrose’s fences are all up again, his rascally lawyers, Nash at the head, are as busy as bees trumping up his case; and I can only suppose that he has been forcing Faversham to write the unscrupulous letters about it that have been appearing in some of the papers.

“What makes it all rather gruesome is that there are the most persistent rumours that the young man has been adopted by Melrose, and will probably be his heir.  I can’t give you any proofs, but I am certain that all the people about the Tower believe it.  If so, he will no doubt be well paid for his soul!  But sell it he must, or go.  I have no doubt he thought he could manage Melrose.  Poor devil!

“The whole thing makes me very sick—­I liked him so much while he was my patient.  And I expect you and Lady Tatham will be pretty disappointed too.”

* * * * *

Victoria returned the letter to her son, pointing to the last sentence.

“It depends on what you expected.  I never took to the young man.”

“Why doesn’t he insist—­or go!” cried Tatham.

“Apparently Melrose has bought him.”

“I say, don’t let’s believe that till we know!”

When his mother left him, Tatham took his way to the moor, and spent an uncomfortable hour in rumination.  Lydia had spoken of Faversham once or twice in her early letters from the south; but lately there had been no references to him at all.  Was she disappointed—­or too much interested?—­too deeply involved?  A vague but gnawing jealousy was fastening on Tatham day by day; and he had not been able to conceal it from his mother.  Lydia was free—­of course she was free!  But friends have their right too.  “If she is really going that way, I ought to know,” thought poor Tatham.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Lydia herself would have been hard put to it to say whither she was going.  But that moral and intellectual landscape which had lain so clear before her when she left Green Cottage was certainly beginning to blur; the mists were descending upon it.

She spent the August and September days working feverishly hard in Delorme’s studio, and her evenings in a pleasant society of young artists, of both sexes, all gathered at the feet of the great man.  But her mind was often far away; and rational theories as to the true relations between men and women were neither so clear nor so supporting as they had been.

She had now two intimate men friends; two ardent and devoted correspondents.  Scarcely a day passed that she was not in touch with both of them.  Her knowledge of the male temperament and male ways of looking at things was increasing fast.  So far she had her desire.  And in her correspondence with the two men, she had amply “played up.”  She had given herself—­her thoughts, feelings, imaginations—­to both; in different ways, and different degrees.