She was not pretty, he thought, as he walked away, but her face was very soft and round and pleasant; her blue eyes very steady and peaceful, with a calmness in them, which, in its way, represented power. Philip, who was, though so steady, somewhat excitable, and apt to be fretted and worried, felt that the repose in her was consolatory and soothing. She would be good to come home to after a man had been baited and bullied in the world. He had thought her an insignificant little girl, but to-night he was not so sure that she was insignificant, and Philip did not know anything, at all about the will and its iron rod. CHAPTER VII. THE WHITE HOUSE. The life of Lucy Trevor, at this period, was divided between two worlds, very dissimilar in constitution. The odd household over which her father’s will and pleasure was paramount, though exercised through the medium of Mrs. Ford, and in which so many out-of-the-way subjects were continually being discussed, all with some personal reference to the old man and his experiences and crotchety principles of action, occupied one part of her time and thoughts: but the rest of her belonged to another sphere--to the orderly circle of studies and amusements of which the central figure was Mrs. Stone, and the scene the White House, a large irregular low building on the edge of the common, which was within sight of Mr. Trevor’s windows in the Terrace, and had appeared, through all the mist and fog of those wintery days, with a kind of halo round its whiteness like that of a rainy and melancholy old moon, tumbled from its high place to the low levels of a damp and flat country. Mrs. Stone’s was known far and wide as the best school for a hundred miles round, the best as far as education was concerned, and also the most exclusive and aristocratic. Lucy Trevor was the only girl in Farafield who was received as a day-pupil. Efforts had been made by people of the highest local standing to procure the admission of other girls of well-known families in the town, but in vain. And why Mrs. Stone had taken Lucy, who was nobody, who was only old John Trevor’s daughter, was a mystery to her best friends. She had offended a great many of the townspeople, but she had flattered the local aristocracy, the county people, by her exclusiveness; and she offended both by the sudden relaxation of her rule on behalf of Lucy. The rector’s daughter would have been a thousand times more eligible, or even Emmy Rushton, whose mother had knocked at those jealous doors in vain for years together; and why should she have taken Lucy Trevor, old John’s daughter, who was nobody, who had not the faintest pretension to gentility? Lady Langton drove in, as a kind of lofty deputation and representative of the other parents who had daughters at Mrs. Stone’s school, to remonstrate with her, and procure the expulsion of the intruder; but Mrs. Stone was equal to the occasion. She did not hesitate to say to the countess, “Your ladyship is at