mother knew, were only two—­fellow-students at South Kensington, absurd people, not to be counted.  Then, pretty as Lydia was, her nose could not be compared for delicacy with her mother’s.  “My nose was always famous”—­Mrs. Penfold would say complacently to her daughters—­“it was that which first attracted your dear father.  ‘It was,’ he said—­you know he always expressed himself so remarkably—­’such a sure sign of “race."’ His own people—­oh! they were quite nice people—­but quite middle-class.”  Again, her hands and feet were smaller and more aristocratic than either Lydia’s or Susan’s.  She liked to remind herself constantly how everybody had admired them and talked about them when she was a girl.

Drawing her work-box toward her, while she waited for Lydia’s return, Mrs. Penfold fell to knitting, while the inner chatter of the mind went as fast as her needles—­concerned chiefly with two matters of absorbing interest:  Lydia’s twenty pounds, and a piece of news about Lydia, recently learnt from the rector’s wife.

As to the twenty pounds, it was the greatest blessing!  Of course the school salary would have been a certainty—­and Lydia had hardly considered it with proper seriousness.  But there—­all was well!  The extra twenty pounds would carry them on, and now that Lydia had begun to earn, thought the maternal optimist, she would of course go on earning—­at higher and higher prices—­and the family income of some three hundred a year would obtain the increment it so desperately needed.  And as Mrs. Penfold looked upon a girls’ school as something not far removed from a nunnery, a place at any rate painfully devoid of the masculine element; and as her whole mind was set—­sometimes romantically, sometimes financially—­on the marriage of her daughters, she felt that both she and Lydia had escaped what might have been an unfortunate necessity.

Yes, indeed!—­what a providential escape, if—­

Mrs. Penfold let fall her knitting; her face sparkled.  Why had Lydia never communicated the fact, the thrilling fact that she had been meeting at the rectory—­more than once apparently—­not merely a young man, but the young man of the neighbourhood.  And with results—­favourable results—­quite evident to the Rector and the Rector’s wife, if Lydia herself chose to ignore and secrete them.  It was really unkind....

The door opened.  A white figure slipped into the room through its mingled lights, and found a stool beside Mrs. Penfold.

“Dear—­are you all right?”

Mrs. Penfold stroked the speaker’s head.

“Well, I thought I was going to have a headache this morning, darling—­but I didn’t—­it went away.  Lydia! the Rector and Mrs. Deacon have been here. Why didn’t you tell me you have been meeting Lord Tatham at the rectory?”

Lydia laughed.

“Didn’t I?  Well, he’s quite decent.”

“Mrs. Deacon says he admired you.  She’s sure he did!” Mrs. Penfold stooped eagerly toward her daughter, trying to see her face in the twilight.