tell me. Lord St. Quentin wants you, and, my little girl, you must go.”

“Couldn’t I say I don’t want to be a marchioness?” poor Sydney asked despairingly; “isn’t there anybody else to be one instead?”

Dr. Chichester shook his grey head sadly; Mr. Fenton’s letter had been clear enough on that point. There was a complete failure of heirs male: and, in the House of Lisle, the female had the power, in such a case, to inherit land and title.

Dr. Chichester knew this as a fact, though he had thought about it very little. There had been nothing to bring it very prominently before him in the seventeen years that had[17] passed since he promised to be a father to the little motherless daughter of his dying patient, Lord Francis Lisle.

[17]

The doctor had come across many sad things in the course of his professional experience, but nothing much sadder than the sight he had seen one cold December day in the little bare bedroom of a miserable lodging-house off Pentonville. He was attending the more urgent cases of a sick friend, and in this way came across Lord Francis and his girl wife. She was lying in the meagre bed, with her young husband fanning her, and a tiny wailing baby at her side.

It was not the first time that Doctor Chichester’s wife had come to bring help to her husband’s poorer patients: she went daily to the little dingy lodging off Pentonville, while the young wife lingered, as though loth to leave the boy-husband who stood watching her with great, sad eyes. The good doctor and his wife soon heard their pitiful little story.

Sydney Henderson had but just left school when she went as governess to the little boy and girl of Lady Braemuir, niece to the Marquess of St. Quentin. It was a big, gay house; but the little governess, playing nursery games with her charges, saw little of the[18] company till Lady Braemuir’s youngest cousin, Lord Francis, came to shoot the Braemuir grouse before joining his regiment.

[18]

The children were full of “Tousin Fwank” before he came. He had stayed at Braemuir six months previously. When he came, the reason of their interest in his arrival became speedily apparent. Francis Lisle was perfectly devoted to children, with a genuine devotion that made mothers beam upon him.

He was known in the nurseries of many a big house: he made himself at home in 

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