In a flash of recollection Randolph suddenly recalled the captain’s words, “There are only three lives between her and the property.”  Their meaning had barely touched his comprehension before.  She was the heiress.  Yes, save for the captain!

She saw the change, the wonder, even the dismay, in his face, and her own brightened frankly.  “It’s so good to find one who never thought of it, who hadn’t it before him as the chief end for which I was born!  Yes, I was the next of kin after dear Jack died and Bill succeeded, but there was every chance that he would marry and have an heir.  And yet the moment he was taken ill that idea was uppermost in my guardian’s mind, good man as he is, and even forced upon me.  If this—­this property had come from poor Cousin Jack, whom I loved, there would have been something dear in it as a memory or a gift, but from him, whom I couldn’t bear—­I know it’s wicked to talk that way, but it’s simply dreadful!”

“And yet,” said Randolph, with a sudden seriousness he could not control, “I honestly believe that Captain Dornton would be perfectly happy—­yes, rejoiced!—­if he knew the property had come to you.”

There was such an air of conviction, and, it seemed to the simple girl, even of spiritual insight, in his manner that her clear, handsome eyes rested wonderingly on his.

“Do you really think so?” she said thoughtfully.  “And yet he knows that I am like him.  Yes,” she continued, answering Randolph’s look of surprise, “I am just like him in that.  I loathe and despise the life that this thing would condemn me to; I hate all that it means, and all that it binds me to, as he used to; and if I could, I would cut and run from it as he did.”

She spoke with a determined earnestness and warmth, so unlike her usual grave naivete that he was astonished.  There was a flush on her cheek and a frank fire in her eye that reminded him strangely of the captain; and yet she had emphasized her words with a little stamp of her narrow foot and a gesture of her hand that was so untrained and girlish that he smiled, and said, with perhaps the least touch of bitterness in his tone, “But you will get over that when you come into the property.”

“I suppose I shall,” she returned, with an odd lapse to her former gravity and submissiveness.  “That’s what they all tell me.”

“You will be independent and your own mistress,” he added.

“Independent,” she repeated impatiently, “with Dornton Hall and twenty thousand a year!  Independent, with every duty marked out for me!  Independent, with every one to criticise my smallest actions—­every one who would never have given a thought to the orphan who was contented and made her own friends on a hundred a year!  Of course you, who are a stranger, don’t understand; yet I thought that you”—­she hesitated,—­“would have thought differently.”

“Why?”

“Why, with your belief that one should make one’s own fortune,” she said.