CHAPTER I.

“WE HAVE BEEN SO HAPPY.”

“I’m afraid she will be a terrible bore,” said the lady, with a slight pettishness in the tone of a voice that was naturally sweet.

“How can she bore us, love? She is only a child, and you can do what you like with her,” said the gentleman.

“My dear John, you have just admitted that she is between thirteen and fourteen—a great deal more than a child—a great overgrown girl, who will want to be taken about in the carriage, and to come down to the drawing-room, and who will be always in the way. Had she been a child of Mildred’s age, and a playfellow for Mildred, I should not have objected half so much.”

“I’m very sorry you object; but I have no doubt she will be a playfellow for Mildred all the same, and that she will not mind spending a good deal of her life in the schoolroom.”

“Evidently, John, you don’t know what girls of fourteen are. I do.”

“Naturally, Maud, since it is not so many years since you yourself were that age.”

The lady smiled, touched ever so slightly by the suggestion of youth, which was gratifying to the mother of a seven-year-old daughter.

The scene was a large old-fashioned drawing-room, in an old-fashioned street in the very best quarter of the town, bounded on the west by Park Lane and on the east by Grosvenor Square. The lady was sitting at her own particular table, in her favourite window, in the summer gloaming; the gentleman was standing with his back to the velvet-draped mantelpiece. The room was full of flowers and prettinesses of every kind, and offered unmistakable evidence of artistic taste and large means in its possessors.

The lady was young and fair, a tall slip of a woman, who afforded a Court milliner the very best possible scaffolding for expensive gowns. The gentleman was middle-aged and stout, with strongly-marked features and a resolute, straightforward expression. The lady was the daughter of an Irish peer; the gentleman was a commoner, whose fortune had been made in a great wholesale firm, which had still its mammoth warehouses near St. Paul’s Churchyard, and its manufactory at Lyons, but with which John Fausset had no longer any connection. He had taken his capital out of the business, and had cleansed himself from the stain of commercial dealings before he married the Honourable Maud Donfrey, third daughter of Lord Castle-Connell.

Miss Donfrey had given herself very willingly to the commoner, albeit he was her senior by more than twenty years, and, in her own deprecating description of him, was quite out of her set. She liked him not a little for his own sake, and for the power his strong will exercised over her own weaker nature; but she liked him still better for the sake of wealth which seemed unlimited.

She was nineteen at the time of her marriage, and she had been married nine years. Those years had brought the Honourable Mrs. Fausset only one child, the seven-year-old daughter playing about the room in the twilight; and maternity had offered very little hindrance to the lady’s pleasures as a woman of fashion. She had been indulged to the uttermost by a fond and admiring husband; and now for the first time in his life John Fausset had occasion to ask his wife a favour, which was not granted too readily. It must be owned that the favour was not a small one, involving nothing less than the adoption of an orphan girl in whose fate Mr. Fausset was interested.

“It is very dreadful,” sighed Mrs. Fausset, as if she were speaking of an earthquake. “We have been so happy alone together—you and I and Mildred.”

“Yes, dearest, when we have been alone, which, you will admit, has not been very often.”

“O, but visitors do not count. They come and go. They don’t belong to us. This dreadful girl will be one of us; or she will expect to be. I feel as if the golden circle of home-life were going to be broken.”

“Not broken, Maud, only expanded.”

“O, but you can’t expand it by letting in a stranger. Had the mother no people of her own; no surroundings whatever; nobody but you who could be appealed to for this wretched girl?” inquired Mrs. Fausset, fanning herself wearily, as she lolled back in her low chair.

She wore a loose cream-coloured gown, of softest silk and Indian embroidery, and there were diamond stars trembling amongst her feathery golden hair. The flowing garment in which she had dined alone with her husband was to be changed presently for white satin and old Mechlin lace, in which she was to appear at three evening parties; but in the meantime, having for once in a way dined at home, she considered her mode of life intensely domestic.

The seven-year-old daughter was roaming about with her doll, sometimes in one drawing-room, sometimes in another. There were three, opening into each other, the innermost room half conservatory, shadowy with palms and tropical ferns. Mildred was enjoying herself in the quiet way of children accustomed to play alone, looking at the pretty things upon the various tables, peering in at the old china figures in the cabinets—the ridiculous Chelsea shepherd and shepherdess; the Chelsea lady in hawking costume, with a falcon upon her wrist; the absurd lambs, and more absurd foliage; and the Bow and Battersea ladies and gentlemen, with their blunt features and coarse complexions. Mildred was quite happy, prowling about and looking at things in silent wonder; turning over the leaves of illustrated books, and lifting the lids of gold and enamelled boxes; trying to find out the uses and meanings of things. Sometimes she came back to the front drawing-room, and seated herself on a stool at her mother’s feet, solemnly listening to the conversation, following it much more earnestly, and comprehending it much better, than either her father or mother would have supposed possible.

To stop up after nine o’clock was an unwonted joy for Mildred, who went to bed ordinarily at seven. The privilege had been granted in honour of the rare occasion—a _tête-à-tête_ dinner in the height of the London season.

“Is there no one else who could take her?” repeated Mrs. Fausset impatiently, finding her husband slow to answer.

“There is really no one else upon whom the poor child has any claim.”

“Cannot she remain at school? You could pay for her schooling, of course. I should not mind that.”

This was generous in a lady who had brought her husband a nominal five thousand pounds, and who spent his money as freely as if it had been water.

“She cannot remain at school. She is a kind of girl who cannot get on at school. She needs home influences.”

“You mean that she is a horrid rebellious girl who has been expelled from a school, and whom I am to take because nobody else will have her.”

“You are unjust and ungenerous, Maud. The girl has not been expelled. She is a girl of peculiar temper, and very strong feelings, and she is unhappy amidst the icy formalities of an unexceptionable school. Perhaps had she been sent to some struggling schoolmistress in a small way of business she might have been happier. At any rate, she is not happy, and as her people were friends of mine in the past I should like to make her girlhood happy, and to see her well married, if I can.”

“But are there not plenty of other people in the world who would do all you want if you paid them. I’m sure I should not grudge the money.”

“It is not a question of money. The girl has money of her own. She is an heiress.”

“Then she is a ward in Chancery, I suppose?”

“No, she is my ward. I am her sole trustee.”

“And you really want to have her here in our own house, and at The Hook, too, I suppose. Always with us wherever we go.”

“That is what I want—until she marries. She will be twenty in five years, and in all probability she will marry before she is twenty. It is not a life-long sacrifice that I am asking from you, Maud; and, remember, it is the first favour I have ever asked you.”

“Let the little girl come, mother,” pleaded Mildred, clambering on to her mother’s knee.

She had been sitting with her head bent over her doll, and her hair falling forward over her face like golden rain, for the last ten minutes. Mrs. Fausset had no suspicion that the child had been listening, and this sudden appeal was startling to the last degree.

“Wisdom has spoken from my darling’s rosy lips,” said Fausset, coming over to the window and stooping to kiss his child.

“My dear John, you must know that your wish is a law to me,” replied his wife, submitting all at once to the inevitable. “If you are really bent upon having your ward here she must come.”

“I am really bent upon it.”

“Then let her come as soon as you like.”

“I will bring her to-morrow.”

“And I shall have some one to play with,” said Mildred, in her baby voice; “I shall give her my second best doll.”

“Not your best, Mildred?” asked the father, smiling at her.

Mildred reflected for a few moments.

“I’ll wait and see what she is like,” she said, “and if she is very nice I will give her quite my best doll. The one you brought me from Paris, father. The one that walks and talks.”

Maud Fausset sighed, and looked at the little watch dangling on her chatelaine.

“A quarter to ten! How awfully late for Mildred to be up! And it is time I dressed. I hope you are coming with me, John. Ring the bell, please. Come, Mildred.”

The child kissed her father with a hearty, clinging kiss which meant a world of love, and then she picked up her doll—not the walking-talking machine from Paris, but a friendly, old-fashioned wax and bran personage—and trotted out of the room, hanging on to her mother’s gown.

“How sweet she is!” muttered the father, looking after her fondly; “and what a happy home it has been! I hope the coming of that other one won’t make any difference.”