And what was happening?  Simply a natural, irresistible discrimination, which was like the slow inflooding of the tide through the river mouth it forces.  Tatham’s letters were all pleasure.  Not a word of wooing in them.  He had given his word, and he kept it.  But the unveiling of a character so simple, strong, and honest, to the eyes of this girl of four-and-twenty, conveyed of itself a tribute that could not but rouse both gratitude and affection in Lydia.  She did her best to reward him; and so far her “ideas” had worked.

Faversham’s letters, on the other hand, from the governing event of the day, had now become a pain and a distress.  The exultant and exuberant self-confidence of the earlier correspondence, the practical dreams on paper which had stirred her enthusiasm and delight—­they came, it seemed to her, to a sudden and jarring end, somewhere about the opening of September.  The change was evidently connected with the return of Mr. Melrose from abroad just at that time.  The letters grew rambling, evasive, contradictory.  Doubt and bitterness began to appear in them.  She asked for facts about his work, and they were not given her.  Instead the figure of Melrose rose on the horizon, till he dominated the correspondence, a harsh and fantastic task-master, to whose will and conscience it was useless to appeal.

When two months of this double correspondence had gone by, and in the absence of Lydia’s usual friends and correspondents from the Pengarth neighbourhood, no other information from the north had arrived to supplement Faversham’s letters, Susy, who was in the Tyrol with a friend, might have drawn ample “copy,” from her sister’s condition, had she witnessed it.  Lydia was most clearly unhappy.  She was desperately interested, and full of pity; yet apparently powerless to help.  There was a tug at her heart, a grip on her thoughts, which increased perpetually.  Faversham wrote to her often like a guilty man; why, she could not imagine.  The appeal of his letters to her had begun to shake her nerves, to haunt her nights.  She longed for the October day when Green Cottage would be free from its tenants, and she once more on the spot.

With the second week of October, Lady Tatham returned to Duddon.  Tatham would have been with her, but that he was detained, grumbling, by a political demonstration at Newcastle.  Never had he felt political speech-making so tedious.  But for a foolish promise to talk drivel to a crowd of people who knew even less about the subject than he, he might have been spending the evening with Lydia.  For the strangers in Green Cottage had departed, and Lydia was again within his reach.

The return to Duddon after an absence had never lost its freshness for Victoria.  Woman of fifty as she was, she was still a bundle of passions, in the intellectual and poetic sense.  The sight of her own fells and streams, the sound of the Cumbrian “aa’s,” and “oo’s,” the scurrying of the sheep among the fern, the breath of the wind in the Glendarra woods, the scent of moss and heather—­these things rilled her with just the same thrills and gushes of delight as in her youth.  Such thrills and gushes were for her own use only; she never offered them for inspection by other people.