“But why do you say _if_ blood means anything, Liddy?” said her mother, “of course it means everything, my love.” Then Lydia looked straight at the two people before her; both so admiring, the one more foolish than the other--and the meaning changed in her face. She sighed; her pretty head, crowned with the glowing red berries and brilliant leaves, drooped a little. “Because I don’t believe it does,” she said. Then there was an outcry, “Oh, Liddy, Liddy!” of horror and alarm from her mother, who had borne everything else, poor soul, but who could not bear any attack upon her last stronghold, her pride of family. It had always been a comfort to her in all her troubles, and specially in those social ones which her greater neighbours had made her suffer--that, to everybody who knew, the Joscelyns were far superior even to her Grace, who had been nobody. To hear her favourite child express this scepticism was terrible. Even Brotherton sustained a slight shock of disappointment. He would have preferred on the whole that Lydia should have felt a romantic certainty of the claims of “blood;” but since it was not so, he made a virtue out of her incredulity, and looked at her with a smile and little nod of sympathy. Lydia, however, was wise enough to make no answer to her mother’s exclamation of horror. “If I went,” she said with great decision, “you would have to go too; I will not go with anybody but you.” “Me, Liddy?” Mrs. Joscelyn cried in alarm. “And my father. I will go with you both, or not at all,” Lydia gave out as her final deliverance; and then she went out of the room, carrying the remains of her autumnal wreaths, and paying no attention to the pathos of her mother’s protestations. Mrs. Joscelyn could do nothing but turn to her young kinsman, and appeal to his impartial judgment. “What should I do among all those fine people? I have not been out in the evening nor worn a low dress (in those days ‘low dresses’ were exacted even from old ladies by the stern fiat of fashion) since that child was born. You must speak to her, you must speak to her, Mr. Brotherton--I mean Lionel. Oh, yes, I want her to go; but me! and Ralph. Ralph has never gone among them, I think he has done himself injustice; but it is too late to change now. You must tell her it would never do.”