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North of Tavistock, on the little river Lyd, are the ruins of Lydford Castle, surrounded by a village of rude cottages. Here originated the "law of Lydford," a proverb expressive of hasty judgment: "First hang and draw, Then hear the cause by Lydford law." One chronicler accounts for this proverb by the wretched state of the castle jail, in which imprisonment was worse than death.
Nothing of all this existed in the Lydford of which Aunt Victoria spoke, although some of her recollections were also of childhood hours. Once Sylvia asked her, "But if you were a little girl there, and Mother was too, then you and Father and she must have played together sometimes?"
"And you 'feel' that I ..." began Arnold, and could not go on. "I'd like you for my brother," she said gently. He tried to laugh at her, but the honest tears were in his eyes. "You don't know what you're talking about, you silly dear," he said unsteadily, "but I'm awfully glad you came to Lydford."
It came to her in fleeting glimpses that Aunt Victoria would be only human if she resented with some heat this entire disregard of her wishes; that the discussion might very well end in a quarrel, and that a quarrel would mean the end of Lydford with all that Lydford meant now and potentially.
He looked like a man who would fall like a rotten tree at the first breath of sickness. He now faced around to her with a return to everyday matters. "See here, Sylvia, I've just got it through my head. Are you waiting here for that five-fifteen train to West Lydford and then are you planning to walk out to the Austin Farm? Great Scott! don't do that, in this heat.
"But, Sylvia, what in the world here, can't we go up under those trees a few minutes and have a talk? I can keep my eye on the mare." As they took the few steps he asked again, "How ever does it happen that you're here at Lydford Junction of all awful holes?" Her manner had the austere simplicity of one who has been moving in great and grave emotions.
They pushed on as fast as they could, through Tavistock, to reach before nightfall Lydford, where they meant to sleep; but what with buying the horses, and other delays, they had not been able to start before noon; and night fell just as they reached the frontiers of the enemy's country. A dreary place enough it was, by the wild glare of sunset.
Sylvia had almost every day the thought that she herself was now in the center of exactly the same picture in which, as a child, she had enviously watched Aunt Victoria. She adored every detail of it. It was an opening-out, even from the Lydford life. She felt herself expanding like a dried sponge placed in water, to fill every crack and crevice of the luxurious habits of life.
"I've a curiosity to see," Aunt Victoria had declared carelessly, "what sort of things are sold in a big Western shop, and besides I've some purchases to make for the Lydford house. Things needs freshening up there. I've thought of wicker and chintz for the living-room. It would be a change from what I've had. Perhaps it would amuse the children to go along?"
There were other moments when all that surge swung back and forth to the rhythm of the poisoned recollection of her unacknowledged humiliation in Lydford; when, inflamed with determination to avoid another such blow in the face, Sylvia almost consciously asked herself, self-contemptuously, "Who am I, an obscure, poverty-stricken music-teacher out of the West, to fancy that I have but to choose between two such men, two such fortunes?" but against this counted strongly the constantly recurring revelations of the obscure pasts of many of the women whom she met during those days, women who were now shining, acknowledged firsts in the procession of success.
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