The man on horseback made some inaudible reply, and they began to talk of a couple of sworn inquiries about to be held on the Threlfall estate by the officials of the Local Government Board, into the housing and sanitation of three of the chief villages on Melrose’s property.  The department had been induced to move by a committee of local gentlemen, in which Tatham had taken a leading part.  The whole affair had reduced itself indeed so far to a correspondence duel between Tatham, as representing a scandalized neighbourhood, and Faversham, as representing Melrose.

Tatham’s letters, in which a man, with no natural gift for the pen, had developed a surprising amount of effective sarcasm, had all appeared in the local press; with Faversham’s ingenious and sophistical replies.  Tatham discussed them now with Undershaw in a tone of passionate bitterness.  The doctor said little.  He had his own shrewd ideas on the situation.

* * * * *

When Undershaw left him, Tatham rode on, up the forest lane, till again the trees fell away, the wide valley with its boundary fells opened before him, and again his eye sought through the windy dusk for the far-gleaming light that spoke to him of Lydia.  His mind was full of fresh agitation, stirred by Undershaw’s remark about her.  The idea of a breach between Lydia and Faversham was indeed most welcome, since it seemed to restore Lydia to that pedestal from which it had been so hard and strange to see her descend.  It gave him back the right to worship her!  And yet, the notion did nothing—­now—­to revive any hope for himself.  He kept the distant light in view for long, his heart full of a tenderness which, though he did not know it, had already parted with much of the bitterness of unsatisfied passion.  Unconsciously, the healing process was on its way; the healing of the normal man, on whom a wound is no sooner inflicted than all the reparative powers of life rush together for its cure.

* * * *

But while Tatham, wrapped in thoughts of Lydia, was thus drawing homeward, across the higher ground of the estate, down through the Duddon woods, as they fell gently to the river, a little figure was hurrying, with the step of a fugitive, and half-nervous, half-exultant looks from side to side.  The moon had risen.  It was not dark in the woods, and Felicia, amid the boschi of the Apuan Alps, had never been frightened of the night or of any ill befalling her.  In Lucca itself she might be insulted; on the hills, never.  She had the independence, and—­generally speaking—­the strength of the working girl.  So that the enterprise on which she was launched—­the quest of her father—­presented itself to her as nothing particularly difficult.  She had indeed to keep it from her mother and Lady Tatham, and to find means of escaping them.  That she calmly took steps to do, not bothering her head much about it.