If she were in truth William Massarene’s daughter she probably knew the share which his sister had so largely taken in the sales of Vale Royal and Blair Airon; and in the persuasion of society to accept the purchasers. He did not know the details of his sister’s diplomacy, but he guessed enough of them for him to burn with shame at the mere conjecture. When his own kith and kin were foremost in this disgraceful traffic what could his own condemnation of it look like--hypocrisy, affectation, subterfuge? What had possessed him to talk of such subjects on a public road to a stranger. He never by any chance “gave himself away.” Why had he done so this day merely because he had felt as if he had known for years a woman who had beautiful feet in fur-rimmed boots and a big bouquet of violets? He was furious at his own folly, and he had told her that story of the fox too, which he had buried so closely in his own breast as men like him do secrete all their best impulses and emotions of which they are more ashamed than of any of their sins and vices! He had never been so incensed and troubled about a trifle in his whole life; and all the high breeding in him made him feel the keenest regret to have so cruelly mortified a woman about her own father and her own position. To a gentleman the knowledge that he has insulted a person who cannot punish him for it is a very dreadful thing. He had said no more than he meant, no more than he felt, and nothing which he would have retracted; but he was extremely sorry that he had said it to the daughter of the man Massarene. To the man himself he would have had the greatest pleasure in saying it. “What was I about to walk across country with a stranger and talk so indiscreetly to her?” he asked himself in self-reproach as sincere as it was useless. She asked herself the same question as she dried her snow-wet clothes before the fire of the Bell Inn, and offered all the notes and gold in her purse to have an old post-chaise got ready at once, and the shoes of two horses roughed. CHAPTER XIII. When she reached Vale Royal, which she did late that night, after a dreary and dangerous drive of fourteen miles, at a walking pace, over frozen roads, she told her parents of the detention of the train by the snow-drift, but she did not tell them of her meeting with Lady Kenilworth’s brother. She was tired and chilled, and went at once to a hot bath and her bed, whither her mother brought her a cup of boiling milk with two spoonsful of Cognac in it.