"That child Hester!" Rose emerged suddenly from a mental voyage of recollection and conjecture. "Now one understands why Lady Fox-Wilton--stupid woman!--has never seemed to care a rap for her. It must indeed be annoying to have to mother a child so much handsomer than your own." "I think I am very sorry for Sir Ralph Fox-Wilton," said Catharine, after a moment. Rose assented. "Yes!--just an ordinary dull, pig-headed country gentleman confronted with a situation that only occurs in plays to which you don't demean yourself by going!--and obliged to tell and act a string of lies, when lies happen to be just one of the vices you're not inclined to! And then afterward you find yourself let in for living years and years with a bad conscience--hating the cuckoo-child, too, more and more as it grows up. Yes!--I am quite sorry for Sir Ralph!" "By the way!"--Flaxman looked up--"Do you know I am sure that I saw Miss Fox-Wilton--with Philip Meryon--in Hewlett's spinney this morning. I came back from Markborough by a path I had never discovered before--and there, sure enough, they were. They heard me on the path, I think, and vanished most effectively. The wood is very thick. But I am sure it was they--though they were some distance from me." Rose exclaimed. "Naughty, _naughty_ child: She has been absolutely forbidden to see him, the whole Fox-Wilton family have made themselves into gaolers and spies--and she just outwits them all! Poor Alice Puttenham hovers about her--trying to distract and amuse her--and has no more influence than a fly. And as for the Rector, it would be absurd, if it weren't enraging! Look at all there is on his shoulders just now--the way people appeal to him from all over England to come and speak--or consult--or organize--(I don't want to be controversial, Catharine, darling!--but there it is). And he can't make up his mind to leave Upcote for twenty-four hours till this girl is safely off the scene! He means to take her to Paris himself on Monday. I only hope he has found a proper sort of Gorgon to leave her with!" Flaxman could not but reflect that the whole relation of Meynell to his ward might well give openings to such a scoundrel like the writer of the anonymous letters, who was certainly acquainted with local affairs. But he did not express this feeling aloud. Meanwhile Catharine, who showed an interest in Hester which surprised both him and Rose, began to question him on the subject of Philip Meryon. Meryon's mother, it seemed, had been an intimate friend of one of Flaxman's sisters, Lady Helen Varley, and Flaxman was well acquainted with the young man's most unsatisfactory record. He drew a picture of the gradual degeneracy of the handsome lad who had been the hope and delight of his warm-hearted, excitable mother; of her deepening disappointment and premature death.