“I’ll swear it, if you like! But I hoped that he—your father—would die first and never know! He deserved no better! He deserved nothing of me! And then you’d have stepped into all! Or better still—do you remember the day you travelled to Bristol? It’s not so long ago that you need forget it, Miss Vermuyden! I was in the coach, and I saw you, and I saw the young man who was with you. I knew him, and I told myself that there was a God after all, though I’d often doubted it, or you two would not have been brought together! I saw another way then, but you’d have parted and known nothing, if,” she continued, laughing recklessly, “I had not helped Providence, and sent him with a present to your school! But—why, you’re red enough now, girl! What is it?” “He knew?” Mary murmured, with an effort. “You told him who I was, Ma’am?” “He knew no more than a doll!” Lady Sybil answered. “I told him nothing, or he’d have told again! I know his kind. No, I thought to get all for you and thwart Vermuyden, too! I thought to marry his heir to the little schoolmistress—it was an opera touch, my dear, and beyond all the Tremaynes and Vivian Greys in the world! But there, when all promised well, that slut of a maid went to my husband, and trumped my trick!” “And Mr.—Mr. Vaughan,” Mary stammered, “had no knowledge—who I was?” “Mr.—Mr. Vaughan!” Lady Sybil repeated, mocking her, “had no knowledge? No! Not a jot, not a tittle! But what?” she went on, in a tone of derision, “Sits the wind there, Miss Meek? You’re not all milk and water, bread and butter and backboard, then, but have a spice of your mother, after all? Mr.—Mr. Vaughan!” again she mimicked her. “Why, if you were fond of the man, didn’t you say so?” Mary, under the fire of those sharp, hard eyes, could not restrain her tears. But, overcome as she was, she managed in broken words to explain that her father had forbidden it. “Oh, your father, was it?” Lady Sybil rejoined. “He said ‘No,’ and no it was! And the lord of my heart and the Man of Feeling is dismissed in disgrace! And now we weep in secret and the worm feeds on our damask cheek!” she ran on in a tone of raillery, assumed perhaps to hide a deeper feeling. “I suppose,” she added shrewdly, “Sir Robert would have you think that Vaughan knew who you were, and was practising on you?” “Yes.” “And you dismissed him at papa’s command, eh? That was it, was it?”