She looked wistfully at the speaker.

“Good luck!  But Mr. Melrose is hard to move.”

Faversham assented.

“The hope lies in his being now an old man—­and anxious to get rid of responsibilities.  I shall try to show him that bad citizenship costs more money than good.”

“I hope—­oh!  I hope—­you’ll succeed!” she said fervently.  Her emotion infected him.  He smiled down upon her.

“That ought to make me succeed!  But of course I have no experience.  I am a townsman.”

“You’ve always been a Londoner?”

“Practically, always.  But I was tired of London before all this happened—­dying to get out of it.”

And he began a short account of himself, more intimate than any he had yet given her; to which Lydia listened with her open, friendly look, perhaps a little shyer than before.  And so different, instinctively, is the way in which a man will tell his story to a woman, from that in which he tells it to a man, that the same half-ironic, half-bitter narrative which had repelled Tatham, attracted Lydia.  Her sympathy rose at once to meet it.  He was an orphan, and till now lonely and unsuccessful; tormented, too, by unsatisfied ideals and ambitions.  Her imagination was pitiful and quick; she imagined she understood.  She liked his frankness; it flattered and touched her.  She liked his deep rich voice, and his dark face, with its lean strength, and almost southern colour.  During his illness he had grown a small peaked beard, and it pleased her artistic sense, by giving him a look of Cardinal Richelieu—­as that great man stood figured in an old French print she had picked up once in a box on the Paris quays.  Moreover his friendship offered her so much fresh knowledge of the world and life.  Here, again, was comradeship.  She was lucky indeed.  Harry Tatham—­and now this clever, interesting man, entering on his task.  It was a great responsibility.  She would not fail either of her new friends!  They knew—­she had made—­she would make it quite plain, that she was not setting her cap at either.  Wider insights, fresh powers, honourable, legitimate powers, for her sex—­it was these she was after.

In all all this Lydia was perfectly sincere.  But the Comic Spirit sitting aloft took note.

They paused a moment on the edge of the plateau on which the house stood—­the ground breaking from it to the west.  A group of cottages appeared amid the woods far away.

“If all estates were like this estate!” cried Lydia, pointing to them, “and all cottages like their cottages!”

Faversham flushed and stiffened.

“Oh! the Tathams are always perfection!”

Lydia’s eyebrows lifted.

“It is a crime?”

“No—­but one hears too much of it.”

“Not from them!” The tone was indignant.

“I daresay.”

Suddenly, he threw her a look which startled her.  She descended from her pony-cart at the steps of the castle, her breath fluttering a little.  What had happened?