‘I came home only this morning,’ said Hillyard, ‘and, of course, the first thing I thought of was to discharge my sad commission. My friend, Mr. Renton, came with me, as he knows better how things go on here than I do. If we could be of any use----’ Ben had got up and bowed in his embarrassment. He was overcome, he thought, with pity, certainly with another and stronger sentiment. ‘If there is anything I can do--?’ he said eagerly. As he spoke the mother raised her head and shot him through and through with a sudden glance of her eyes,--eyes which must once have been soft like her daughter’s, but which had grown keen, clear, and cold, instead of soft--with a hungry look in them. But how can you criticise a woman in such circumstances? They might be puckered up with grief; it might be the anguish of Rachel’s weeping that looked through them. She said, ‘It is very kind,’ looking at them both, contrasting as it were the two together; and then with a certain abruptness, ‘What was it you were saying to me about some Rentons, Millicent?’ she asked. ‘You know, mamma,’ said the daughter, ‘Thornycroft, where I was at school, was close to the Manor, and Mary Westbury was always talking of her cousins. But perhaps this gentleman----’ ‘Yes; I am one of Mary Westbury’s cousins,’ said Ben, with a throb of delight; and then he paused, thinking what else he could say to ingratiate himself. ‘I am the eldest;--Ben,’ he added, with heightened colour;--and mother and daughter both looked at him with an interest which they did not attempt to disguise. ‘I have heard so often of Ben,’ said Miss Tracy, with a soft, little laugh. The sound of his own name so softly uttered completed the young man’s bewilderment. He forgot how soon that laugh had followed on the tears, and how entirely the mother and daughter had both thrown themselves into the new subject. As for Hillyard, he sat between the two with a puzzled expression on his face. Nobody took any notice of him after the telling of his story. His friend who had the cachet of the latest civilisation on him, who was a Renton of Renton, the eldest son, was a very different person from an adventurer out of the bush. Mrs. Tracy herself came forward from the little back drawing-room where she had been sitting, and took a chair near the new object of interest. She was a handsome woman still for her age, and showed traces of having been like her daughter. She had the same clear, fine features; the same dark hair, still unchanged in colour; the same height and drooping grace of form. But her eyes, instead of being soft and dewy, were hard and keen; her lips were thin, and the muscles all tightened about them. Her hands were thin and long, and looked as if they could grasp and hold fast. ‘The daughter will grow like the mother, and I’d trust neither of them,’ Hillyard said to himself; but there might be a certain spite in it, for they showed no interest in him.