“Never mind,” said her ladyship’s sister, and the old woman, looking up into her eyes, found there the colour Mount Dunstan had thought of as being that of bluebells under water.  “I think we can manage it, Mrs. Welden.  Keep yourself as warm as you like, and sometime I will come and have a cup of tea with you and see if the tea is good.”

“Oh!  Deary me!” said Mrs. Welden.  “I can’t think what to say, miss.  It lifts everythin’—­everythin’.  It’s not to be believed.  It’s like bein’ left a fortune.”

When the wicket gate swung to and the young lady went up the lane, the old woman stood staring after her.  And here was a piece of news to run into Charley Jenkins’ cottage and tell—­and what woman or man in the row would quite believe it?

CHAPTER XXV

“We began to marry them, my good fellow!”

Lord Dunholm and his eldest son, Lord Westholt, sauntered together smoking their after-dinner cigars on the broad-turfed terrace overlooking park and gardens which seemed to sweep without boundary line into the purplish land beyond.  The grey mass of the castle stood clear-cut against the blue of a sky whose twilight was still almost daylight, though in the purity of its evening stillness a star already hung, here and there, and a young moon swung low.  The great spaces about them held a silence whose exquisite entirety was marked at intervals by the distant bark of a shepherd dog driving his master’s sheep to the fold, their soft, intermittent plaints—­the mother ewes’ mellow answering to the tender, fretful lambs—­floated on the air, a lovely part of the ending day’s repose.  Where two who are friends stroll together at such hours, the great beauty makes for silence or for thoughtful talk.  These two men—­father and son—­were friends and intimates, and had been so from Westholt’s first memory of the time when his childish individuality began to detach itself from the background of misty and indistinct things.  They had liked each other, and their liking and intimacy had increased with the onward moving and change of years.  After sixty sane and decently spent active years of life, Lord Dunholm, in either country tweed or evening dress, was a well-built and handsome man; at thirty-three his son was still like him.

“Have you seen her?” he was saying.

“Only at a distance.  She was driving Lady Anstruthers across the marshes in a cart.  She drove well and——­” he laughed as he flicked the ash from his cigar—­“the back of her head and shoulders looked handsome.”