"Now I'm almost sure she is something to him; and she has come down
here with him to see her people," said Jane Payland to herself, as she
sat desolately by the fire in her mistress's room, a well-thumbed novel
lying neglected on her knee; "and she's mean enough to be ashamed of
them. Well, I don't think I should be that of my own flesh and blood,
if I was ever so great and so grand. I suppose the bag is full of
presents--I'm sure she might have told me if it was clothes she was
going to give away; I shouldn't have grudged 'em to the poor things."
Grumbling a good deal, wondering more, and feasting a little, Jane
Payland got through the time until her mistress returned. But for all
her grumbling, and all her suspicion, the girl was daily growing more
and more attached to her mistress, and her respect was increasing with
her liking. Lady Eversleigh returned to the inn alone late on that
dismal Christmas-night, and she looked worn, troubled, and weary. After
a few kind words to Jane Payland, she dismissed the girl, and went to
bed, very tired and heart-sick. "How am I to prove it?" she asked
herself, as she lay wearily awake. "How am I to prove it? in my
borrowed character I am suspected; in my own, I should not be believed,
or even listened to for a moment. He is a good man, that Lionel Dale,
and he is doomed, I fear."
On the morning of the twenty-sixth Mr.
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