“You’re awfully good to us.  It’s twenty years!—­” Her voice failed her.

“Twenty years—­yes, indeed! since I drove over to see you that time!  Your daughter was a little toddling thing.”

“We’ve had such a life—­these last few years—­oh, such an awful life!  My old father’s still alive—­but would be better if he were dead.  My mother depended on us entirely—­she’s dead.  But I’ll explain everything—­everything.”

It was clear, however, that till sleep had knit up the ravelled nerves of the poor lady, no coherent conversation was possible.  Victoria hastened to depart.

“To-morrow you shall tell me all about yourself.  My son will be home to-morrow.  We will consult him and see what can be done.”

Mother and daughter were left alone.  Felicia rose feebly to go to her own room, which adjoined her mother’s.  She was wearing a dressing-gown of embroidered silk—­pale blue, and shimmering—­which Victoria’s maid had wrapped her in, after the child’s travelling clothes, thread-bare and mud-stained, had been taken off.  The girl’s tiny neck and wrists emerged from it, her little head, and her face from which weariness and distress had robbed all natural bloom.  What she was wearing, or how she looked, she did not know and did not care.  But her mother, in whom dress had been for years a passion never to be indulged, was suddenly—­though all her exhaustion—­enchanted with her daughter’s appearance.

“Oh, Felicia, you look so nice!”

She took up the silk of the dressing-gown and passed it through her fingers covetously; then her tired eyes ran over the room, the white bed standing ready, the dressing-table with its silver ornaments and flowers, the chintz-covered sofas and chairs.

“Why shouldn’t we be rich too?” she said angrily.  “Your father is richer than the Tathams.  It’s a wicked, wicked shame!”

Felicia put her hand to her head.

“Oh, do let me go to bed,” she said in Italian.

Netta put her arm round her, supporting her.  Presently they passed a portrait on the wall, an enlarged photograph of a boy in cricketing dress.

Underneath it was written: 

“Harry.  Eton Eleven.  July 189—–­.”

Felicia for the first time showed a gleam of interest.  She stopped to look at the picture.

“Who is it?”

“It must be her son, Lord Tatham.”

The girl’s sunken eyes seemed to drink in the pleasant image of the English boy.

“Shall we see him?”

“Of course.  To-morrow.  Now come to bed!”

Felicia’s head was no sooner on the pillow than she plunged into sleep.  Netta, on the other hand, was for a long time sleepless.  The luxury of the bed and the room was inexpressibly delightful and reviving to her.  Recollections of a small bare house in the Apuan Alps above Lucca, and of all that she and Felicia had endured there, ran through her mind, mingled with visions of Threlfall as she had known it of old, its choked passages—­the locked room from which she had stolen the Hermes—­the great table in Edmund’s room with its litter of bric-a-brac—­Edmund himself....