So days and weeks and months went on, and brought with them the conviction that the girl was lost for ever. Nothing was heard of her either at Winstead or at Beechfield, and Hubert Lepel was obliged at last to acknowledge that all his efforts had been in vain. The girl refused to be benefited any longer; the wild blood in her veins had asserted itself; she was probably leading the outcast life from which he thought that he had rescued her; she had gone down on the tide of poverty and vice and crime which floods the London streets. He shuddered sometimes when he thought of it. He haunted the doors of theatres, the courts and alleys of East London, looking sombrely for a face which he would not have known if he had seen it. He fancied that Andrew Westwood's daughter would bear her history in her eyes--the great dark eyes that he remembered as her sole beauty when she was a child. It was a mad fancy, born of his desire to atone for a wrong that he had done to an innocent man. The wrong seemed greater than ever when it darkened the life of a weak young girl and tortured the heart of the innocent man's own child. CHAPTER X. Eight years had passed away since the tragedy that brought the little village of Beechfield into luckless notoriety. During those eight years what changes had taken place! Even at quiet rustic Beechfield many things had come to pass. Old Mr. Rumbold had been gathered to his fathers, and Mrs. Rumbold had gone to live with friends in London. The new Rector was young, energetic, good-looking, and unmarried. At the Hall there were changes too. Enid Vane had grown from a delicate child into a lovely girl of seventeen. The house was no longer chill and desolate--brightness seemed to have come back to it with her growth--a brightness which even the General, saddened as he had been by his brother's death, could not resist. He had taken his own way of contributing to the cheerfulness of the Hall. Six months after Mrs. Sydney Vane's death he had married Florence Lepel, as Miss Vane had predicted that he would, and a little boy of five years old was now running about the Hall gardens and calling the General "father." The old man positively adored this little lad, and believed him to be perfection. He was fond of Enid and of his wife, but he doated on the child. He seemed indeed to love him more than did the mother of the boy. Florence Lepel was not perhaps of a very loving disposition, but it was remarkable that she apparently almost disliked little Dick. She never petted or fondled the child--sometimes she rebuked him very angrily. And yet he was docile, sweet-tempered, and quick-witted, though not particularly handsome; but Florence had never liked children, and she made her own son no exception to the rule.