“It is only a pear-drop,” she said apologetically to Netta.  “It won’t hurt her.”

Felicia snatched at it at once, and sucked it, still flushed with passion.  Her mother smiled faintly.

“You like sweets?” she said, childishly, to her companion; “give me one?”

Thyrza eagerly brought out a paper bag from her pocket and Netta put out a pair of thin fingers.  She and her sisters had been great consumers of sweet stuff in the small dark Florentine shops.  The shared greediness promoted friendship; and by the time Mrs. Dixon put in a reproachful face with a loud—­“Thyrza, what be you a doin’?”—­Mrs. Melrose knew as much of the Tower, the estate, the farm, and the persons connected with them, as Thyrza’s chattering tongue could tell her in the time.

There was nothing, however, very consoling in the information.  When Thyrza departed, Mrs. Melrose was left to fret and sigh much as before.  The place was odious; she could never endure it.  But yet the possible advent of “Countess Tatham” cast a faint ray on the future.

A few days later Lady Tatham appeared.  Melrose had been particularly perverse and uncommunicative on the subject.  “Like her audacity!”—­so Netta had understood his muttered comment, when she took him the cards.  He admitted that the lady and he were cousins—­the children of first cousins; and that he had once seen a good deal of her.  He called her “an audacious woman”; but Mrs. Melrose noticed that he did not forbid her the house; nay, rather that he listened with some attention to Thyrza’s report that the lady had promised to call again.

On the afternoon of the call, the skies were clear of rain, though not of cloud.  The great gashed mountain to the north which Dixon called Saddleback, while a little Cumbria “guide,” produced by Tyson, called it Blencathra, showed sombrely in a gray light; and a November wind was busy stripping what leaves still remained from the woods by the stream and in the hollows of the mountain.  Landscape and heavens were of an iron bracingness and bareness; and the beauty in them was not for eyes like Netta’s.  She had wandered out forlornly on the dank paths descending to the stream.  Edmund as usual was interminably busy fitting up one of the lower rooms for some of his minor bric-a-brac—­ironwork, small bronzes, watches, and clocks.  Anastasia and the baby were out.

Would Anastasia stay?  Already she looked ill; she complained of her chest.  She had made up her mind to come with the Melroses for the sake of her mother and sister in Rome, who were so miserably poor.  Netta felt that she—­the mistress—­had some security against losing her, in the mere length and cost of the journey.  To go home now, before the end of her three months, would swallow up all the nurse had earned; for Edmund would never contribute a farthing.  Poor Anastasia!  And yet Netta felt angrily toward her for wishing to desert them.

“For of course I shall take her home—­in March.  We shall all be going then,” she said to herself with an emphasis, almost a passion, which yet was full of misgiving.