CHAPTER XI.
"Cruel" For two or three days after the first scene between the Duke and his daughter,--that scene in which she was forbidden either to see or to write to her lover,--not a word was said at Matching about Mr.
Tregear, nor were any steps taken towards curtailing her liberty of action.

She had said she would not write to him without telling her father, and the Duke was too proud of the honour of his family to believe it to be possible that she should deceive him.

Nor was it possible.

Not only would her own idea of duty prevent her from writing to her lover, although she had stipulated for the right to do so in some possible emergency,--but, carried far beyond that in her sense of what was right and wrong, she felt it now incumbent on her to have no secret from her father at all.

The secret, as long as it had been a secret, had been a legacy from her mother,--and had been kept, at her lover's instance, during that period of mourning for her mother in which it would, she thought, have been indecorous that there should be any question of love or of giving in marriage.