“Don’t do anything against your mother’s will,” she said gently.  “You are too young to decide these things for yourself.  But, if you can, persuade her to follow Lord Tatham’s advice.  He is most anxious to help you in the best way.  And he does not believe that Mr. Melrose could hurt your grandfather.”

Felicia shook her curly head, frowning.

“One cannot persuade mother—­one cannot.  She is obstinate—­oh, so obstinate!  If it were me, I would do anything Lord Tatham asked me!—­anything in the world.”

She stood with her hands behind her back, her slight figure drawn up, her look glowing.

Victoria bent over her embroidery, smiling a little, unseen, and, in truth, not ill pleased.  Yet there was something disturbing in these occasional outbursts.  For the little Southerner’s own sake, one must take care they led to nothing serious.  For really—­quite apart from any other consideration—­Harry never took the smallest notice of her.  And who could know better than his mother that his thoughts were still held, still tormented by the vision of Lydia?

Felicia slipped out of a glass door that led to the columned veranda outside.  Victoria, mindful of the girl’s delicate look, hurried after her with a fur wrap.  Felicia gratefully but absently kissed her hand, and Victoria left her to her own thoughts.

It was a sunny day, and although November was well in, there was almost an Italian warmth in this southern loggia where roses were still blooming.  Felicia walked up and down, her gaze wandering over the mountain landscape to the south—­the spreading flanks and slopes of the high fells, scarlet with withered fern, and capped with new-fallen snow.  Through the distant landscape she perceived the line of the stream which ran under Flitterdale Common with its high cliff-banks, and hanging woods, now dressed in the last richness of autumn.  That distant wall of trees—­behind it, she knew, was Threlfall Tower.  Her father—­her unkind, miserly father, who hated both her and her mother—­lived there.

How far was it?  A long way!  But she would get there somehow.

“It is my right to see my father!” she said to herself passionately; adding with a laugh which swept away heroics, “After all, he might take a fancy to me in these clothes!”

And she looked down complacently on the pretty tailor-made skirt and the new shoes that showed beneath Victoria’s fur cloak.  In less than a fortnight her own ambition and the devotion of Victoria’s maid, Hesketh, only too delighted to dress somebody so eager to be dressed, for whom the mere operations of the toilette possessed a kind of religious joy, on whom, moreover, “clothes” in the proper and civilized sense of the word, sat so amazingly well—­had turned the forlorn little drudge into a figure more than creditable to the pains lavished upon her.  Felicia aimed high.  The thought and trouble which the young lady had spent, since her arrival, on her