"Very well; do just as you like. Your aunt has a Mudie subscription, I believe"--what this meant Lesley had not the faintest idea--"and you will find books in the library, and a piano in the drawing-room. You must ask for anything you want." As if that was likely, Lesley thought! "I hope you will make friends and be comfortable. And--a--" he paused, and hesitated in his speech as he went on--"a--I hope--your mother--Lady Alice--was well when you left her?" "Pretty well," Lesley answered, dropping her eyes. "Was she going to Scotland for the winter?" "I think so." "Oh." He seemed satisfied with the answer. "By the way, Lesley, are you Catholic or Protestant?" "Protestant. Mamma would not allow the Sisters to talk to me about religion. I always drove to the English Church on Sundays." "Oh, very well. Do as you please. There are plenty of churches near us. But you need not bring more clergy than you can help to the house," said Brooke, with a peculiar smile. "I am not very fond of the Blacks. I am more of a Red myself, you know." "A Red?" Lesley asked, helplessly. "A Red Republican--Radical--Socialist--anything you like," said Brooke, laughing outright. "You didn't read the papers in your convent, I suppose. You had better begin to study them straight away. It will be a pleasant change from the Lives of the Saints. And now, if we have finished all that we have to say--I am rather busy, and----" "Oh, I beg your pardon: I will go," said Lesley, rising at once. "I had no wish to intrude upon you," she added, with an attempt to be dignified and womanly, which she felt to be a miserable failure. Her father simply nodded in reply, took up his pen, and allowed her to leave the room. But when she had gone, he put the pen down and sat back in his chair, musing. Lesley had surprised him a little. She had more force and fire in her composition than he had expected to find. She was, as he had said, very like her mother in face and figure; and the minute differences of line and contour that showed Lesley to be strong where Lady Alice had been weak, original where Lady Alice had been most conventional, intellectual where Lady Alice had been only intelligent, were not perceptible at first sight even to a practised observer of men and women like Caspar Brooke. But the flash of her brown eyes, so like his own, and an occasional intonation in her voice, had told him something. She was in arms against him, so much he felt; and she had more individuality than her mother, in spite of her ignorance. It was a pity that her education had been so much neglected! Manlike, Caspar Brooke took literally every word that she had uttered; and reproached himself for having allowed his foolish, frivolous wife to bring up his daughter in a place where she had been taught nothing but embroidery and dancing.