Toft had gone into Riddsley on the polling-day, but had returned before the result was known. "What the man was thinking of," his wife declared in wrath, "beats me! To be there hours and hours and come out no wiser than he went, and we waiting to hear--a babe would ha' had more sense! The young master that we've known all our lives, to be in or out, and we to know nothing till morning! It passes patience!"

Mary had her own feelings, but she concealed them. "He must know how it was going when he left?" she said.

"He doesn't know an identical thing!" Mrs. Toft replied. "And all he'd say was, 'There, there, what does it matter?' For all the world as if he spoke to a child! 'What else matters, man?' says I. 'What did you go for?' But there, Miss, he's beyond me these days! I believe he's going like the poor master, that had a bee in his bonnet, God forgive me for saying it! But what'd one not say, and we to wait till morning not knowing whether those plaguy Repealers are in or out!"

"But Mr. Basset is for Repeal," Mary said.

"What matter what he's for, if he's in?" Mrs. Toft replied loftily. "But to wait till morning to know--the man's no better than a numps!"

In the end, it was Mr. Colet who brought the news to the Gatehouse. He brought it to Etruria and so much of moment with it that before noon the election result had been set aside as a trifle, and Mary found herself holding a kind of court in the parlor--Mr. Colet plaintiff, Etruria defendant, Mrs. Toft counsel for the defence. Absence had but strengthened Mr. Colet's affection, and he came determined to come to an understanding with his mistress. He saw his way to making a small income by writing sermons for his more indolent brethren, and, in the meantime, Mr. Basset was giving him food and shelter; in return he was keeping Mr. Basset's accounts, and he was saving a little, a very little, money. But the body of his plea rested not on these counts, but on the political change. Repeal was in the air, repeal was in the country. Vote as Riddsley might, the Corn Laws were doomed. His opinions would no longer be banned; they would soon be the opinions of the majority, and with a little patience he might find a new curacy. When that happened he wished to marry Etruria.

"And why not?" Mary asked.

"I will never marry him to disgrace him," Etruria replied. She stood with bowed head, her hands clasped before her, her beautiful eyes lowered.

"But you love him?" Mary said, blushing at her own words.

"If I did not love him I might marry him," Etruria rejoined. "I am a servant, my father's a servant. I should be wronging him, and he would live to know it."

"To my way o' thinking, 'Truria's right," her mother said. "I never knew good come of such a marriage! He's poor, begging his reverence's pardon, but, poor or rich, his place is there." She pointed to the table. "And 'Truria's place is behind his chair."

"But you forget," Mary said, "that when she is Mr. Colet's wife her place will be by his side."

"And much good that'll do him with the parsons and such like, as are all gleg together! If he's in their black books for preaching too free--and when you come to tithes one parson is as like another as pigs o' the same litter--he'll not better himself by taking such as Etruria, take my word for it, Miss!"

"I will never do it," said Etruria.

"But," Mary protested, "Mr. Colet need not live here, and in another part people will not know what his wife has been. Etruria has good manners and some education, Mrs. Toft, and what she does not know she will learn. She will be judged by what she is. If there is a drawback, it is that such a marriage will divide her from you and from her father. But if you are prepared for that?"

Mrs. Toft rubbed her nose. "We'd be willing if that were all," she said. "She'd come to us sometimes, and there'd be no call for us to go to her."

Mr. Colet looked at Etruria. "If Etruria will come to me," he said, "I will be ashamed neither of her nor her parents."

"Bravely said!" Mary cried.

"But there's more to it than that," Mrs. Toft objected. "A deal more. Mr. Colet nor 'Truria can't live upon air. And it's my opinion that if his reverence gets a curacy, he'll lose it as soon as it's known who his wife is. And he can't dig and he can't beg, and where'll they be with the parsons all sticking to one another as close as wax?"

"He'll not need them!" replied a new speaker, and that speaker was Toft. He had entered silently, none of them had seen him, and the interruption took them aback. "He'll not need them," he repeated, "nor their curacies. He'll not need to dig nor beg. There's changes coming. There's changes coming for more than him, Miss. If Mr. Colet's willing to take my girl she'll not go to him empty-handed."

"I will take her as she stands," Mr. Colet said, his eyes shining. "She knows that."

"Well, you'll take her, sir, asking your pardon, with what I give her," Toft answered. "And that'll be five hundred pounds that I have in hand, and five hundred more that I look to get. Put 'em together and they'll buy what's all one with a living, and you'll be your own rector and may snap your fingers at 'em!"

They stared at the man, while Mrs. Toft, in an awestruck tone, cried, "You're out of your mind, Toft! Five hundred pounds! Whoever heard of the like of us with that much money?"

"Silence, woman," Toft said. "You know naught about it."

"But, Toft," Mary said, "are you in earnest? Do you understand what a large sum of money this is?"

"I have it," the man replied, his sallow cheek reddening. "I have it, and it's for Etruria."

"If this be true," Mr. Colet said slowly, "I don't know what to say, Toft."

"You've said all that is needful, sir," Toft replied. "It's long I've looked forward to this. She's yours, and she'll not come to you empty-handed, and you'll have no need to be ashamed of a wife that brings you a living. We'll not trouble except to see her at odd times in the year. It will be enough for her mother and me that she'll be a lady. She never was like us."

"Hear the man!" cried Mrs. Toft between admiration and protest. "You'd suppose she wasn't our child!"

But Mary went to him and gave him her hand. "That's very fine, Toft," she said. "I believe Etruria will be as happy as she is good, and Mr. Colet will have a wife of whom he may be proud. But Etruria will not be Etruria if she forgets her parents or your gift. Only you are sure that you are not deceiving yourself?"

"There's my bank-book to show for half of it," Toft replied. "The other half is as certain if I live three months!"

"Well, I declare!" Mrs. Toft cried. "If anybody'd told me yesterday that I'd have--'Truria, han't you got a word to say?"

Etruria's answer was to throw her arms round her father's neck. Yet it is doubtful if the moment was as much to her as to the ungainly, grim--visaged man, who looked so ill at ease in her embrace.

The contrast between them was such that Mary hastened to relieve the sufferer. "Etruria will have more to say to Mr. Colet," she said, "than to us. Suppose we leave them to talk it over."

She saw the Tofts out after another word or two, and followed them. "Well, well, well!" said Mrs. Toft, when they stood in the hall. "I'm sure I wish that everybody was as lucky this day--if all's true as Toft tells us."

"There's some in luck that don't know it!" the man said oracularly. And he slid away.

"If he said black was white, I'd believe him after this," his wife exclaimed, "asking your pardon, Miss, for the liberties we've taken! But you'd always a fancy for 'Truria. Anyway, if there's one will be pleased to hear the news, it's the Squire! If I'd some of those nine here that voted against him I'd made their ears burn!"

"But perhaps they thought that Mr. Basset was wrong," Mary said.

"What business had they o' thinking?" Mrs. Toft replied. "They had ought to vote; that's enough for them."

"Well, it does seem a pity," Mary allowed. And then, because she fancied that Mrs. Toft looked at her with meaning, she went upstairs and, putting on her hat and cloak, went out. The day was cold and bright, a sprinkling of snow lay on the ground, and a walk promised her an opportunity of thinking things over. Between the Butterflies, at the entrance to the flagged yard, she hung a moment in doubt, then she set off across the park in the direction of the Great House.

At first her thoughts were busy with Etruria's fortunes and the mysterious windfall which had enriched Toft. How had he come by it? How could he have come by it? And was the man really sane? But soon her mind took another turn. She had strayed this way on the morning after her arrival at the Gatehouse, and, remembering this, she looked across the gray, frost-bitten park, with its rows of leafless trees and its naked vistas. Her mind travelled back to that happy morning, and involuntarily she glanced behind her.

But to-day no one followed her, no one was thinking of her. Basset was gone, gone for good, and it was she who had sent him away. The May morning when he had hurried after her, the May sunshine, gay with the songs of larks and warm with the scents of spring were of the past. To-day she looked on a bare, cold landscape and her thoughts matched it. Yet she had no ground to complain, she told herself, no reason to be unhappy. Things might have been worse, ah, so much worse, she reflected. For a week ago she had been a captive, helpless, netted in her own folly! And now she was free.

Yes, she ought to be happy, being free; and, more than free, independent.

But she must go from here. And for many reasons the thought of going was painful to her. During the nine months which she had spent at the Gatehouse it had become a home. Its panelled rooms, its austerity, its stillness, the ancient woodlands about it were endeared to her by the memory of lamp-lit evenings and long summer days. The very plainness and solitude of the life, which had brought the Tofts and Etruria so near to her, had been a charm. And if her sympathy with her uncle had been imperfect, still he had been her uncle and he had been kind to her.

All this she must leave, and something else which she did not define; which was bound up with it, and which she had come to value when it was too late. She had taken brass for gold, and tin for silver! And now it was too late. So that it was no wonder that when she came to the hawthorn-tree where she had gathered her may that morning, a sob rose in her throat. She knew the tree! She had marked it often. But to-day there was no one to follow her, no one to call her back, no one to say that she should go no farther. Basset was gone, her uncle was dead.

Telling herself that, as she would never see it again, she would go as far as the Great House, she pushed on to the Yew Walk. Its recesses showed dark, the darker for the sprinkling of snow that lay in the park. But it was high noon, there was nothing to fear, and she pursued the path until she came to the crumbling monster that tradition said was a butterfly.

She was still viewing it with awe, thinking now of the duel which had taken place there, now of her uncle's attack, when a bird moved in the copse and she glanced nervously behind her, expecting she knew not what. The dark yews shut her in, and involuntarily she shivered. What if, in this solitary place--and then through the silence the sharp click of the Iron Gate reached her ear.

The stillness and the associations shook her nerves. She heard footsteps and, hardly knowing what she feared, she slipped among the trees and stood half-hidden. A moment passed and a man appeared. He came from the Great House. He crossed the opening slowly, his chin sunk upon his breast, his eyes bent on the path before him. A moment and he was gone, the way she had come, without seeing her.

It was Lord Audley, and foolish as the impulse to hide herself had been, she blessed it. Nothing pleasant, nothing good, could have come of their meeting; and into her thoughts of him had crept so much of distaste that she was glad that she had not met him in this lonely spot. She went on to the Iron Gate, and viewed for a few moments the desolate lawn and the long, gaunt front. Then, reflecting that if she turned back at once she might meet him, she took a side-path through the plantation, and emerged on the park at another point.

She was careful not to reach home until late in the day and then she learned that he had called, that he had waited, and that in the end Toft had seen him; and that he had departed in no good temper. "What Toft said to him," Mrs. Toft reported, "I know no more than the moon, but whatever it was his lordship marched off, Miss, as black as thunder."

After that nothing happened, and of the four at the Gatehouse Etruria alone was content. Mrs. Toft was uneasy about the future--what were they going to do?--and perplexed by Toft's mysterious fortune--how had he come by it? Toft himself was on the rack, looking for things to happen--and nothing happened. And Mary knew that she must take action. She could not stay at the Gatehouse, she could not remain as the guest either of Basset or of Lord Audley.

But she did not know where to go, and no suggestion reached her. At length she wrote, two days after Lord Audley's visit, to Quebec Street, to the house where she had stayed with her father many years before. It was the only address of the kind that she knew. But she received no answer, and her heart sank. The difficulty, small as it was, harassed her; she had no adviser, and ten times a day, to keep up her spirits, she had tell herself that she was independent, that she had eight thousand pounds, that the whole world was open to her, and that compared with the penniless girl who had lived on the upper floor of the HÔtel Lambert she was fortunate!

But in the HÔtel Lambert she had had work to do, and here she had none!

She thought of taking rooms in Riddsley, but Lord Audley was there and she shrank from meeting him. She would wait another week for the answer from London, and then, if none came, she must decide what she would do. But in her room that night the thought that Basset had abandoned her, that he no longer cared, no longer desired to come near her, broke her down. Of course, he was not to blame. He fancied her still engaged to her cousin and receiving from him all the advice, all the help, all the love, she needed. He fancied her happy and content, in no need of him. And, alas, there was the pinch. She had written to him to tell him of her engagement. She could not write to him to tell him that it was at an end!

And then, by the morrow's post, there came a long letter from Basset, and in the letter the whole astonishing, overwhelming story of the discovery of the document which John Audley had sought so long, and in the end so disastrously.

"No doubt," the writer added, "Lord Audley has made you acquainted with the facts, but I think it my duty as your uncle's executor to lay them before you in detail and also to advise you that in your interest and in view of the change in your position--and in Lord Audley's--which this imports, it is proper that you should have independent advice."

The blood ebbed and left Mary pale; it returned in a flood as with a bounding heart and shaking fingers she read and turned and re-read this letter. At length she grasped its meaning, and truly what astounding, what overwhelming news! What a shift of fortune! What a reversal of expectations! And how strangely, how singularly had all things shaped themselves to bring this about--were it true!

Unable to sit still, unable to control her excitement--and no wonder--she rose and paced the floor. If she were indeed Lady Audley! If this were indeed all hers! This dear house and the Great House! This which had seemed to its possessor so small, so meagre, so cramping an inheritance, but was to her fortune, an old name, a great place, a firm position in the world! A position that offered so many opportunities and so much power for good!

She walked the room with throbbing pulses, the letter now crushed in her hand, now smoothed out that she might assure herself of its meaning, might read again some word or some sentence, might resolve some doubt. Oh, it was a wonderful, it was a marvellous, it was an incredible turn of fortune! And presently her mind began to deal with and to sift the past. And, enlightened, she understood many of the things that had perplexed her, and read many of the riddles that had baffled her. And her cheeks burned, her heart was hot with indignation.