the claim to the peerage, if nothing else-"
"What claim?" she asked. "Whose claim? What peerage? I am quite in the dark."
He stared. He did not believe her. "Your uncle's claim," he said curtly. Then as she still looked a question, "You must know," he continued, "that your uncle claimed the title which Lord Audley bears, and the property which goes with it. And that the decision was only given against him three months ago."
"I know nothing of it," she said. "I never heard of the claim."
"Really?" he replied. He hardly deigned to veil his incredulity. "Yet if your uncle had succeeded you were the next heir."
"I?"
"Yes, you."
Then her face shook his unbelief. She turned slowly and painfully red. "Is it possible?" she said. "You are not playing with me?"
"Certainly I am not. Do you mean that Lord Audley never told you that? Never told you that you were interested?"
"Never! He only told me that he was not on good terms with my uncle, and that for that reason he would leave me to learn the rest at the Gatehouse."
"Well, that was right," Basset answered. "It is as well, since you have to live with Mr. Audley, that you should not be prejudiced against him."
"No doubt," she said dryly. "But I do not understand why he did not answer my letters."
"Did you write to him?"
"Twice." She was going to explain the circumstances, but she refrained. Why appeal to the sympathies of one who seemed so cold, so distant, so indifferent?
"He cannot have had the letters," Basset decided after a pause.
"Then how did he come to write to me at last?"
"Lord Audley sent your address to him."
"Ah!" she said. "I supposed so." With an air of finality she turned to the window, and for some time she was silent. Her mind had much upon which to work.
She was silent for so long that before more was said they were running through the outskirts of Birmingham, and Mary awoke with a shock to another and sadder side of England. In place of parks and homesteads she saw the England of the workers-workers at that time exploited to the utmost in pursuance of a theory of economy that heeded only the wealth of nations, and placed on that wealth the narrowest meaning. They passed across squalid streets, built in haste to meet the needs of new factories, under tall chimneys the smoke of which darkened the sky without hindrance, by vile courts, airless and almost sunless. They looked down on sallow children whose only playground was the street and whose only school-bell was the whistle that summoned them at dawn to premature toil. Haggard women sat on doorsteps with puling babes in their arms. Lines of men, whose pallor peered through the grime, propped the walls, or gazed with apathy at the train. For a few minutes Mary forgot not only her own hopes and fears, but the aloofness and even the presence of her companion. When they came to a standstill in the station, where they had to change on to the Grand Junction Railway, Basset had to speak twice before she understood that he wished her to leave the carriage.
"What a dreadful place!" she exclaimed.
"Well, it is not beautiful," Basset admitted. "One does not look for beauty in Birmingham and the Black Country."
He got her some tea, and marshalled her carefully to the upper line. But his answer had jarred upon her, and when they were again seated, Mary kept her thoughts to herself. Beyond Birmingham their route skirted towns rather than passed through them, but she saw enough to deepen the impression which the lanes and alleys of that place had made upon her. The sun had set and the cold evening light revealed in all their meanness the rows of naked cottages, the heaps of slag and cinders, the starveling horses that stood with hanging heads on the dreary lands. As darkness fell, fires shone out here and there, and threw into Dantesque relief the dark forms of half-naked men toiling with fury to feed the flames. The change which an hour had made in all she saw seemed appalling to the girl; it filled her with awe and sadness. Here, so near the paradise of the country and the plough, was the Inferno of the town, the forge, the pit! Here, in place of the thatched cottage and the ruddy faces, were squalor and sunken cheeks and misery and dearth.
She thought of the question which Lord Audley had raised twenty-four hours before, and which he had told her was racking the minds of men-should food be taxed? And she fancied that there was, there could be, but one answer. These toiling masses, these slaves of the hammer and the pick, must be fed, and, surely, so fed that a margin, however small, however meagre, might be saved out of which to better their sordid lot.
"We call this the Black Country," Basset explained, feeling the silence irksome. After all, she was in his charge, in a way she was his guest. He ought to amuse her.
"It is well named," she answered. "Is there anything in England worse than this?"
"Well, round Hales Owen and Dudley," he rejoined, "it may be worse. And at Cradley Heath it may be rougher. More women and children are employed in the pits; and where women make chains-well, it's pretty bad."
She had spoken dryly to hide her feelings. He replied in a tone as matter-of-fact, through lack of feeling. For this he was not so much to blame as she fancied, for that which horrified her was to him an everyday matter, one of the facts of life with which he had been familiar from boyhood. But she did not understand this. She judged him and condemned him. She did not speak again.
By and by, "We shall be at Penkridge in twenty minutes," he said. "After that a nine-miles drive will take us to the Gatehouse, and your journey will be over. But I fear that you will find the life quiet after Paris."
"I was very quiet in Paris."
"But you were in a large house."
"I was at the Princess Czartoriski's."
"Of course. I suppose it was there that you met Lord Audley?"
"Yes."
"Well, after that kind of life, I am afraid that the Gatehouse will have few charms for you. It is very remote, very lonely."
She cut him short with impatience, the color rising to her face. "I thought you understood," she said, "that I was in the Princess's house as a governess? It was my business to take care of a number of children, to eat with them, to sleep with them, to see that they washed their hands and kept their hair clean. That was my position, Mr. Basset. I do not wish it to be misunderstood."
"But if that were so," he stammered, "how did you-"
"Meet Lord Audley," she replied. "Very simply. Once or twice the Princess ordered me to descend to the salon to interpret. On one of these occasions Lord Audley saw me and learned-who I was."
"Indeed," he said. "I see." Perhaps he had had it in his mind to test her and the truth of Audley's letter, which nothing in her or in my lord's conduct seemed to confirm. He did not know if this had been in his mind, but in any case the result silenced him. She was either very honest or very clever. Many girls, he knew, would have slurred over the facts, and not a few would have boasted of the Princess's friendship and the Princess's society, and the Princess's hôtel, and brought up her name a dozen times a day.
She is very clever, he thought, or she is-good. But for the moment he steeled himself against the latter opinion.
No other travellers alighted at Penkridge, and he went away to claim
