Lady Tatham’s expression showed a mind drawn back into the past.

“When I first saw him, he was a magnificent creature.  For several years I was dazzled by him.  Then when I—­and others—­broke with him, he turned his back on England and went to live abroad.  And gradually he quarrelled with everybody who had ever known him.”

“But you never did care about him, mother?” cried Tatham, outraged by the mere notion of any such thing.

“No—­never.”  There was a deliberate emphasis on the words.  The smile that followed was slight but poignant.  “I knew that still more plainly, when, six months after I ceased to see him, your father came along.”

Tatham who had drawn her hand within his arm, laid his own upon it for a moment.  He was in the happy position of a son in whom filial affection represented no enforced piety, but the spontaneous instinct of his nature.  His mother had been so far his best friend; and though he rarely spoke of his father his childish recollections of him, and the impression left by his mother’s constant and deliberate talk of him, during the boyish years of her son, had entered deep into the bases of character.  It is on such feelings and traditions that all that is best in our still feudal English life is reared; Tatham had known them without stint; and in their absence he would have been merely the trivially prosperous young man that he no doubt appeared to the Radical orators of the neighbourhood.

The wood thinned.  They emerged from it to see the Helvellyn range lying purple under a southwest sky, and Tatham’s gray mare waiting a hundred yards away.

“You have no note?”

Tatham tapped his breast pocket.

“Rather!”

“All right—­go along!” Lady Tatham came to a halt.  “And Harry—­don’t call too often!  Is this the third visit this week?”

“Oh, but the others were such little ones!” he said eagerly.

“Don’t try to go too quick.”  The tone was serious.

“Too quick!  I make no way at all,” he protested, his look clouding.

Tatham rode slowly along the Darra, the little river which skirted his own land and made its way at last into that which flowed beneath the Tower.  He was going to Threlfall, but on his way he was to call at Green Cottage and deliver a note from his mother.

He had seen a good deal of Lydia Penfold during the weeks since her first appearance at Duddon.  The two sisters had been induced to lunch there once or twice; there had been a picnic in the Glendarra woods; and for himself, in spite of his mother’s attack, he thought he had been fairly clever in contriving excuses for calls.  On one occasion he had carried with him—­by his mother’s suggestion—­a portfolio containing a dozen early proofs of the “Liber Studiorium,” things about which he knew little or nothing; but Lydia’s eyes had sparkled when he produced them, which was all he cared for.  On the second, he had called to offer them a key which