in which they stood until she came to an opening leading to an old arch which faced a broad and spacious court-yard. As she rode beneath the arch a number of dogs yelped a welcome from kennels or behind stable half-doors, and a bent old man, dressed like something between a stableman and a butler, came forward, touching his forehead, to take her horse. She slipped from the saddle, patted the horse, and murmured a word or two of endearment; but her bright eyes flashed round the court-yard with a glance of responsibility.
"Have you brought the colt in, Jason?" she asked.
Jason touched his forehead again.
"Yes, Miss Ida. It took me three-quarters of an hour; it won't come to me like it does to you. It's in a loose stall."
"Saddle it to-morrow morning," she said, "and I will come and try it. The brindle cow has got into the corn, and the fence wants mending down by the pool; you must get William to help you, and do it at once. He has taken the steers to market, I suppose? I didn't see them in the three acre. Oh, and, Jason, I found someone fishing in the dale; you must get a notice board and put it up where the road runs near the river; the tourists' time is coming on, and though they don't often come this side of the lake, some of them may, and we can't afford to have the river poached. And, Jason, look to Ruppert's off-hind shoe; I think it's loose; and—" She stopped with a short laugh. "But that's enough for one time, isn't it? Oh, Jason, if I were only a man, how much better it would be!"
"Yes, miss," assented Jason, simply, with another touch of his forehead.
She sighed and laughed again, and gathering up her habit—she hadn't to raise it much—she went through an open door-way into a wild, but pretty garden, and so to the back of one of the most picturesque houses in this land of the picturesque. It was built of grey stone which age had coloured with a tender and an appreciative hand; a rich growth of ivy and clematis clung lovingly over a greater portion of it so that the mullioned windows were framed by the dark leaves and the purple flower. The house was long and rambling and had once been flourishing and important, but it was now eloquent of decay and pathetic with the signs of "better times" that had vanished long ago. A flight of worn steps led to a broad glass door, and opening the latter, the girl passed under a curved wooden gallery into a broad hall. It was dimly lit by an oriel window of stained glass, over which the ivy and clematis had been allowed to fall; there was that faint odour which emanates from old wood and leather and damask; the furniture was antique and of the neutral tint which comes from age; the weapons and the ornaments of brass, the gilding of the great pictures, were all dim and lack-lustre for want of the cleaning and polishing which require many servants. In the huge fire-place some big logs were burning, and Donald and Bess threw themselves down before it with a sigh of satisfaction. The girl looked round her, just as she had looked round the stable-yard; then, tossing her soft hat and whip on the old oak table, she went to one of the large heavy doors, and knocking, said in her clear voice:
"Father, are you there?"
Inside the room an old man sat at a table. It was littered with books, some of them open as if he had been consulting them; but before him lay an open deed, and at his elbow were several others lying on an open deed-box. He was thin and as faded-looking and as worn with age as the house and the room, lined with dusty volumes and yellow, surface-cracked maps and pictures. He wore a long dressing-gown which was huddled round him as if he were cold, though a fire of logs almost as large as the one in the hall was burning in the open fire-place.
At the sound of the knock he raised his head, an expression, which was a mixture of fear and senile cunning came into his lined and pallid face, his dull eyes peered from under their lids with a flash of sudden alertness, and with one motion of his long hands he hurriedly folded the deed before him, crammed it, with the others, into the box, locked it with a hurried and trembling hand, and placed it in a cupboard, which he also locked; then he drew one of the large books into the place were the deed had been, and with a cautious glance round the room, shuffled to the door, and opened it.
As the girl entered, one would have noticed the resemblance between her and the old man, and have seen that they were father and daughter; for Godfrey Heron had been one of the handsomest men of his time, and though she had got her dark eyes and the firm, delicate lips from her mother, the clear oval of her face and its expression of aristocratic pride had come from the Herons.
"Are you here still, father?" she said. "It is nearly dinner-time, and you are not dressed. You promised me that you would go out: how wicked of you not to have done so!"
He shuffled back to the table and made a great business of closing the book.
"I've been busy—reading, Ida," he said. "I did not know it was so late. You have been out, I see; I hope you have enjoyed your ride. Have you met anyone?"
"No," she replied; then she smiled, as she added: "Only a poacher."
The old man raised his head, a faint flush came on his face and his eyes flashed with haughty resentment.
"A poacher! What are the keepers about! Ah, I forgot; there are no keepers now; any vagrant is free to trespass and poach on Herondale!"
"I'm sorry, father!" she said, laying her hand on his arm soothingly.
"It was not an ordinary poacher, only a gentleman who had mistaken the
Heron water for the Avory's. Come now, father, you have barely time to
dress."
"Yes, yes, I will come in a moment—a moment," he said.
But after she had left the room, he still lingered, and when at last he got to the door, he closed it and went back to the cupboard and tried it, to see if it were locked, muttering, suspiciously:
"Did she hear me? She might have heard the rustle of the parchment, the turn of the lock. Sometimes I think she suspects—But, no, no, she's a child still, and she'd say something, speak out. No, no; it's all right. Yes, yes, I'm coming, Ida!" he said aloud, as the girl called to him on her way up the stairs.
CHAPTER II.
As Stafford climbed the hill steadily, he wondered who the girl was. It did not occur to him that she might be the daughter of the Mr. Heron to whom the stream belonged and from whose family name the whole dale had taken its own; for, though she had looked and spoken like a lady, the habit, the gauntlets, the soft felt hat were old and weather-stained: and her familiarity with the proper treatment of a sheep in difficulty indicated rather the farmer's daughter than that of the squire.
She was not by any means the first pretty girl Stafford had seen—he had a very large acquaintance in London, and one or two women whose beauty had been blazoned by the world were more than friendly with the popular Stafford Orme—but he thought as he went up the hill, which seemed to have no end, that he had never seen a more beautiful face than this girl's; certainly he had never seen one which had impressed him more deeply. Perhaps it was the character of the loveliness which haunted him so persistently: it was so unlike the conventional drawing-room type with which he was so familiar.
As he thought of her it seemed to him that she was like a wild and graceful deer—one of the deer which he had seen coming down to a mountain stream to drink on his father's Scotch moor; hers was a wild, almost savage loveliness—and yet not savage, for there had been the refinement, the dignity of high race in the exquisite grey eyes, the curve of the finely cut lips. Her manner, also, prevented him from forgetting her.
He had never met with anything like it, she had been as calm and self-possessed as a woman of forty; and yet her attitude as she leant forward in the saddle, her directness of speech, all her movements, had the abandon of an unconscious child; indeed, the absence of self-consciousness, her absolute freedom from anything like shyness, combined with a dignity, a touch of hauteur and pride, struck him as extraordinary, almost weird.
Stafford was not one of your susceptible young men; in fact, there was a touch of coldness, of indifference to the other sex