I wished that day I had never left my children.

II.

I must pass over a long period now—­I suppose I should have said I was writing of a great many years ago, and come to the time, twenty years later, when Paul came home from abroad.  He had not been home all these years, and neither had I been once in the south.

Janet, my poor Janet, was long since dead.  She had died before she was quite two years married.  It was an additional pang to my grief that I had never said good-bye to her at all; but no good-bye was better than that awful one I had witnessed of Paul.

What was the precise explanation of it I never knew.  It was easy to divine that Janet had indeed been engaged to marry Paul, and had given him up; but whether this was the result of some quarrel, or whether she had deliberately done it, dazzled by the prospect of a union with an earl’s son, I cannot say.  Anyhow, I am sure she quickly regretted her determination.  I am certain she loved only Paul.  But the word had been spoken, and whatever Vandeleur may have been, Paul was not a man to give any woman a chance of trifling with him twice.  So my poor Janet had to reap what her folly had sown, as best she might.

Janet left one little child, a daughter, called Janet, after her; and this child, becoming an orphan at an early age by the death, next, of Stephen Vandeleur, was brought up with his family in Ireland.

She was in Scotland once when she was about fourteen, and I saw her, and was not favourably impressed.  She was quiet and prim and proper, as cold as an icicle:  a very pretty little girl, I owned that; but then I had thought to find something of my Janet, and was disappointed.  Her eyes were indeed blue, but looked one in the face calmly as though they had belonged to a woman of forty; and her hair and long eye-lashes were as dark as night.  She had just this of my Janet, her pink and snow wild-rose complexion.  She seemed to me, in all else, a Vandeleur to her finger-tips.

She occasionally paid Duncan long visits; and as she grew up, I heard that Duncan tried to make these visits as frequent and as lengthy as possible.  She was immensely admired, it seemed, and Duncan liked her to stay with him because of the people she attracted to his house.  I was sure this was true.  It was so like one of Duncan’s horrid ways.  He still lived in that white brick edifice, and was richer then ever.  A good deal of gossip drifted to me, in the far north as I was.  I was told that Janet had a Manchester millionaire, an American railway king, and a real live lord, all madly in love with her—­and she not yet quite nineteen!

Just then Paul returned home, and Duncan wrote inviting me to come down and see them.  Paul was to stay with them—­and Duncan was quite proud about it.  His predictions had turned out all wrong; for Paul had come home a personage of importance, and a very rich man indeed.  I was almost sorry that Janet’s child happened to be at Duncan’s just then, thinking her presence would revive old memories better forgotten.  And then, if Paul were at all like what he used to be, I was sure her calmly superior, supercilious little ways would irritate him intensely.  I had never seen her at Duncan’s, but I could fancy how she would look there.