At her own door her father met her and took her into the parlour where the tea-things were spread, and where her sisters were already seated.  Her stepmother soon came in and kissed her kindly.  She was asked how she had enjoyed herself, and no disagreeable questions were put to her that night.  No questions, at least, were asked which she felt herself bound to answer.  After she was in bed Kate came to her and did say a word.  “Well, Mary, do tell me.  I won’t tell any one.”  But Mary refused to speak a word.

CHAPTER IV

The Rufford Correspondence

It might be surmised from the description which Lord Rufford had given of his own position to his sister and his sister’s two friends, when he pictured himself as falling over the edge of the precipice while they hung on behind to save him, that he was sufficiently aware of the inexpediency of the proposed intimacy with Miss Trefoil.  Any one hearing him would have said that Miss Trefoil’s chances in that direction were very poor,—­that a man seeing his danger so plainly and so clearly understanding the nature of it would certainly avoid it.  But what he had said was no more than Miss Trefoil knew that he would say,—–­or, at any rate would think.  Of course she had against her not only all his friends,—­but the man himself also and his own fixed intentions.  Lord Rufford was not a marrying man,—­which was supposed to signify that he intended to lead a life of pleasure till the necessity of providing an heir should be forced upon him, when he would take to himself a wife out of his own class in life twenty years younger than himself for whom he would not care a straw.  The odds against Miss Trefoil were of course great;—­but girls have won even against such odds as these.  She knew her own powers, and was aware that Lord Rufford was fond of feminine beauty and feminine flutter and feminine flattery, though he was not prepared to marry.  It was quite possible that she might be able to dig such a pit for him that it would be easier for him to marry her than to get out in any other way.  Of course she must trust something to his own folly at first.  Nor did she trust in vain.  Before her week was over at Mrs. Gore’s she received from him a letter, which, with the correspondence to which it immediately led, shall be given in this chapter.

Letter No.  I.

Rufford, Sunday.

My Dear Miss Trefoil,

We have had a sad house since you left us.  Poor Caneback got better and then worse and then better,—­and at last died yesterday afternoon.  And now; there is to be the funeral!  The poor dear old boy seems to have had nobody belonging to him and very little in the way of possessions.  I never knew anything of him except that he was, or had been, in the Blues, and that he was about the best man in England to hounds on a bad horse.  It now turns out that his father made some money in India,—­a sort of Commissary