As to the hatred of Melrose which gave zest to the tale of his daughter, it was becoming a fury.  The whole Mainstairs village had now been ejected, by the help of a large body of police requisitioned from Carlisle for the purpose.  Of the able-bodied, some had migrated to the neighbouring towns, some were camped on Duddon land, in some wood and iron huts hastily run up for their accommodation.  And thus a village which might be traced in Doomsday Book had been wiped out.  For the sick Tatham had offered a vacant farmhouse as a hospital; and Victoria, Mrs. Andover, and other ladies had furnished and equipped it.  Some twenty cases of enteric and diphtheria, were housed there, a few of them doomed beyond hope.  Melrose had been peremptorily asked for a subscription to the fund raised, and had replied in his own handwriting that owing to the heavy expenses he had been put to by the behaviour of his Mainstairs tenants, as reported to him by his agent, Mr. Faversham, he must respectfully decline.  The letter was published in the two local papers with appropriate comments, and a week later an indignation meeting to protest against the state of the Threlfall property, and to petition the Local Government Board to hold an inquiry on the spot, was held in Carlisle, with Tatham in the chair.  And everywhere the public indignation which could not get at Melrose, who now, except for railway journeys, never showed himself outside the wall of his park, was beginning to fall upon the “adventurer” who was his tool and accomplice, and had become the supplanter of his young and helpless daughter.  Men who four months before had been eager to welcome Faversham to his new office now passed him in the street without recognition.  At the County Club to which he had been easily elected, Colonel Barton proposing him, he was conspicuously cut by Barton himself, Squire Andover and many others following suit.  “An impostor, and a cad!” said Barton fiercely to Undershaw.  “He took me in—­and I can’t forgive him.  He is doing all Melrose’s dirty work for him, better than Melrose could do it himself.  His letters, for instance, to our Council Committee about the allotments we are trying to get out of the old villain have been devilish clever, and devilish impudent!  Melrose couldn’t have written them.  And now this business of the girl!—­and the fortune!—­sickening!”

“He is a queer chap,” said Undershaw thoughtfully.  “I’ve been as mad with him as anybody—­but somehow—­don’t know.  Suppose we wait a bit.  Melrose’s life is a bad one.”

But Barton refused to wait, and went off storming. 
The facts, he vowed, were more than enough.

The weeks passed on.  Duddon knew no longer what Green Cottage was doing.  Victoria, at any rate, was ignorant, and forbore to ask—­by word of mouth; though her thoughts were one long interrogation on the subject of Lydia, both as to the present and the past.  Was she still in correspondence with Faversham, as Victoria now understood from Tatham she had been all the summer?  Was she still defending him?  Perhaps engaged to him?  For a fair-minded and sensible woman, Victoria fell into strange bogs of prejudice and injustice in the course of these ponderings.