Jacinth hesitated.

'But there _was_ a choice,' she said; and now there was a touch of timidity in her voice.

Colonel Mildmay considered; they were approaching the crucial point, and he took his resolution.

'No, Jacinth,' he said. 'To my mind, as an honourable man, there was no choice. I should have forfeited for ever my own self-respect had I agreed to Lady Myrtle's proposal.'

And then he rapidly, but clearly, put before her the substance of their old friend's intentions and wishes, and his reasons for refusing to fall in with them.

'Lady Myrtle is too good a woman to sow discord in a family,' he said, 'between a child and her parents. And it was impossible for us to approve of the apportionment of her property she proposed, knowing that there exist at this very time those who _have_ a claim on her, who most thoroughly deserve the restoration of what should have been theirs always; who have suffered, indeed, already only too severely for the sin and wrong-doing of another.'

Jacinth started, and the lines of her face hardened again.

'I thought it was that,' she exclaimed. 'Those people--they are at the bottom of it, then.'

'Jacinth!' said her mother.

'I beg your pardon, mamma,' said the girl quickly. 'It must sound very strange for me to speak like that; but, you don't know how I have been teased about these Harpers. And mamma, Lady Myrtle doesn't look upon them as you and papa do, so why should you expect me to do so? Do you suppose she will leave _them_ anything she would have left us--me?'

'Very likely not,' said Colonel Mildmay.

'Then for everybody's sake, why not have left things as Lady Myrtle meant? I--we, I mean,' and Jacinth's face crimsoned, 'could have been good to them; it would have been better for them in the end.'

'Do you suppose they would have accepted help--money, to put it coa.r.s.ely--from strangers?' said Colonel Mildmay. 'It is not _help_ they should have, but actual practical restoration of what should be theirs.

And even supposing our decision does them no good, can't you see, Jacinth, that anything else would be _wrong_?'

'No,' said Jacinth, 'I don't see it.'

'Then I am sorry for you,' said her father coldly.

'I know,' said Jacinth, 'that Lady Myrtle likes things one way or another. I suppose she will give us up altogether now. I suppose she will leave off caring anything about me. You think very badly of me, papa, I can see; you think me mercenary and selfish and everything horrid; but--it _wasn't_ only for myself, and it isn't only because of what she was doing for us, and meant to do for us. I have got to love Lady Myrtle very much, and I shall feel dreadfully the never seeing her any more, and--and'----

Here, not altogether to her mother's distress, Jacinth broke down and began to sob bitterly. Mrs Mildmay got up from her seat, and came close to where the girl was sitting by the table.

'My poor dear child,' she said, 'we have never thought you selfish in _that_ sort of way.'

'No,' agreed her father; 'that you may believe. You have had of late too much responsibility thrown upon you, and it has given you the feeling that the whole fortunes of your family depended upon you in some sense.

Be content to be a child a little longer, my Jacinth, and to trust your parents. And there is no need for you to antic.i.p.ate any change with Lady Myrtle. She will care for you, and for us all, as much as ever--more perhaps; and as much time as it will be right for you to spend away from your own home, you shall have our heartiest consent to spending with her. If you can in any way give her pleasure--and I know you can--it will be the very least we can do in return for her really wonderful goodness to us.'

'I should like to see her; to be with her sometimes,' said Jacinth, whose sobs had now calmed down into quiet crying. 'But I don't want--once we go away to that place--I don't want ever to see Robin Redbreast again. Ever since'--and here she had to stop a moment--'ever since that first day when we pa.s.sed it with Uncle Marmy, I have had a sort of feeling to this house--a kind of presentiment. I can't bear to think of its going to strangers, or--or people that know nothing about Lady Myrtle. And very likely, if she leaves all she has to big hospitals or something like that, very likely this place will be sold.'

'It may be so,' said Colonel Mildmay; and he added with a smile, 'I wish for your sake I were rich enough to buy it, my poor dear child.'

So Jacinth's castles in the air were somewhat rudely destroyed. There was but one consolation to her. Lady Myrtle was even more loving than hitherto, though she said nothing about the collapse of her plans. For Mrs Mildmay gave her to understand that matters, so far as was fitting, had been explained to her elder daughter.

'Humph!' said the old lady. 'That seals _my_ lips. For of course I cannot express disapproval of her parents to the child.'

But her tenderness and marked affection went some way to soothe the smarting of the girl's sore feelings.

'She understands me far better than papa and mamma do,' thought Jacinth.

'If they meant me to see everything through their eyes, they shouldn't have left me away from them all these years.'

Still a curious strain of pride in her father's stern honesty, in his utter disinterestedness, now and then mingled with her feelings of disappointment. She could not help feeling proud of him! Nevertheless the tears were many and bitter which Jacinth shed when the last night of their stay at Robin Redbreast came.

CHAPTER XVII.

TWO DEGREES OF HONESTY.

Barmettle is not an attractive place; though like most places in this varied world it has its interests and even no doubt its charm for many of its inhabitants--its bright and happy homes, as well as its thousands of hard, if not overworked, pale-faced artisans, men and women, of many grades and cla.s.ses.

And the sun can shine there sometimes; and not so many miles from the very centre of the town, you can escape from the heavy pall of smoke-filled air, into fresh and picturesque country, whose beauties, to my thinking, strike one all the more vividly from the force of contrast with the ugliness and griminess which you cannot forget are so near.

There had been some talk--when the Mildmay family first contemplated the pitching of their tent in this unknown land--there had been some talk of a house in the neighbourhood of the town, a few miles out, where a garden and a field or two would have been possible, to reconcile the children and their mother, to some extent, to the great change from all their former experiences. But Colonel Mildmay had been obliged to give up hopes of this. There were several difficulties in the way, and _the_ house which sometimes at such crises turns up with such undeniable advantages as to over-ride the less immediate objections, had not offered itself. So, considering the inconvenience of scanty communication between the barracks and the 'pretty' side of the outskirts, the impossibility of day-school arrangements for Eugene, and a very certain amount of loneliness and isolation, especially in the winter months, the fairly desirable house in St Wilfred's Place which _did_ offer itself carried the day.

It was but five minutes' walk from Colonel Mildmay's official quarters, and conveniently near Eugene's school; it was very much in the minds of the teachers who now replaced the Misses Scarlett's inst.i.tution as regarded the girls; it was not duller as to outlook and surroundings than had to be at Barmettle, for it faced St Wilfred's Church, one of the oldest and most interesting structures in the modern town, which had once been a pleasant straggling north-country village; and last, though not least, its rent was moderate.

And Mrs Mildmay, unspoilt by her long residence in the East--as full of energy and resources as when she arranged the drawing-rooms at Stannesley in her careless girlish days, and laughed merrily at her kind step-mother's old-fashioned notions--exerted herself to make the house as pretty as she possibly could.

'I am glad it is cheap,' she said to her husband, 'for we can afford to spend rather more in making it comfortable and nice, especially for Ja.s.sie.'

And Jacinth's room was all a girl could wish, and at night, when the outer world was shut off, and the dark square hall and wide quaint staircase, which had attracted the new tenants in their house-hunting, were lighted up, looking bright and cheerful with the crimson carpets and curtains which Barmettle smoke had not as yet had time to dull, Frances's expression of approval, 'Really it looks so nice that you might fancy it wasn't Barmettle at all,' could scarcely be contradicted.

But Frances, like her mother, was born with the happy faculty for seeing the best side of things. It was all, naturally, much harder on Jacinth.

And as Jacinth stood one morning in November looking out into the dreary street, where rain had been pouring down ever since daybreak, and was still dripping monotonously, she did feel that her lines had not of late fallen in pleasant places. Yet she was not so selfish as this sounds.

She had made a struggle to see things as her parents did, and in this she had not been entirely unsuccessful, and the constant love and watchful sympathy which were now a part of her daily life, unconsciously influenced her in good and gentle ways which she scarcely realised.

Some ground she had gained. She had come to see that if her father and mother felt about the Harper family as they did, they could not have acted otherwise. And her own conscience was not, it will be remembered, entirely clear. 'Of course,' she said to herself, 'if Lady Myrtle had been left to do as she wished, I should have felt it my duty to do something for the Harpers. I'm sure I should have found some way of managing it.' But no doubt there was a kind of relief in feeling it was taken out of her hands, for Jacinth was growing gradually less confident in her own powers: for the first time in her life she was realising the delight and privilege of having others wiser than herself to whom she could look up.

'Mamma,' she said, on the morning in question, 'do you think there really are places where it rains ever so much more than at others? or is it only that we notice it more at some? I really could almost think that it rains here _every_ day.'

Mrs Mildmay smiled.

'No, dear, it really does not. I don't think the rainfall here is much greater than in London or at Thetford, but the heavy air and the grayness make us, as you say, notice it more. In many places where there actually is more rain than the average, the country is peculiarly bright and fresh. Think of the gra.s.s in Ireland.'

But Jacinth's thoughts were already wandering elsewhere.

'Mamma,' she began again, 'do you think we shall have to stay here for Christmas?'

'I suppose so,' replied Mrs Mildmay. 'Even if Lady Myrtle wished it--as indeed I am sure she does--it would hardly be worth while for us to go to her for only two or three days, which is all the leave your father could get. And there are a good many things we have to see to here.'

'Yes,' said Frances, 'there's the Christmas treat for the barracks children. It's never been properly done. And Miss Lettice Piers is going to invite us to their treat at St Wilfred's first, so that we may see.

I'd like best to have our visits to Robin Redbreast in the summer, except that it must be rather dull for Lady Myrtle. She was so pleased to have us there last Christmas.'

'I wish we could have her here,' said Mrs Mildmay. 'But she would never be allowed to come up north in the winter.'