What made him look so old and strange? And surely mother’s head was bent down low above her work to hide her tears! Sydney stopped short, with an exclamation of dismay.

Father grasped a letter in a hand that shook. Vaguely she saw that the crumpled envelope had “Lincoln’s Inn” upon the back. It was the letter which had come with hers at four o’clock that afternoon!

The hall clock heralded the striking of six by a variety of strange wheezing sounds: when it had slowly tinged away the six strokes, father spoke.

[15]

[15]

CHAPTER II HER OWN PEOPLE

HER OWN PEOPLE

Half an hour had gone by—the very longest half hour in Sydney’s happy life; and there was silence in the drawing-room.

Father had been speaking, but he was silent now, standing with his face turned towards the shuttered windows. On the floor knelt Sydney, her head on mother’s knee. She was not crying—this calamity seemed too great for tears—tears such as had been shed over the untimely fate of Prissie’s bullfinch, or the sewing up by father of that dreadful cut in Ronald’s cheek. Her shoulders shook with suppressed sobs, but no tears came.

“My little girl,” mother was speaking, with a gentle hand on the untidy brown head on her knee, “my poor little girl!”

Sydney lifted up her piteous face.

“Oh, mother, you will let me stay your little girl! I can’t go away. Oh, mother, you always said I was given to you!”

[16]

[16]

Dr. Chichester blew his nose violently, and came and sat down beside his wife.

“See here, my little Sydney,” he said. “God knows you can’t cease to be our child to us, as you have been for these seventeen years. If it were acting rightly to keep you, do you suppose your mother and I could consent to let our little girl go from us? Still, we have got to do the right thing; and when your poor young father gave you to us, he had no idea of your ever coming near the title. But now this accident to your cousin, Lord St. Quentin, makes you heiress to it, so your cousin’s man of business writes to 

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