Elisabeth Kidd Read Online Free

a comfortable night.
    Sydney did not blow out her candle immediately, however. She pulled out a large and rather battered leather-covered journal which she had secreted under her mattress when Mrs. Collins’s back was turned, and for half an hour she occupied herself with writing furiously in it with a thick pencil.
    Even after she had put it away again, however, she remained sitting upright against her pillows for some time, not composing her mind peacefully for sleep but agitating it yet further by dwelling on the arrogance, the conceit, and—since she could hardly fault him on his manners—the general iniquitousness of the Marquess of Lyle. Who did he suppose he was to look her over in that odiously patronizing way? And to talk to her as if she were an idiot child!
    She was certain it had been Lyle’s laugh she heard as she left the library. She might have expected as much—in fact, she had expected it, from the awful moment when her Uncle Augustus had informed her she was to be bundled off to this dreadful place! She had not wanted to go, and had said so in no uncertain terms. Unfortunately, this had made her uncle only the more determined.
    “I do not wish to cause you unhappiness, my dear,” he had said with a sigh and what Sydney’s youngest cousin called his “saintly look,” “but in this case I believe I must put what is best for you before what you imagine you want at this moment. The acquaintance of such a distinguished man as the Marquess of Lyle cannot but be an influence for good in your life, and indeed I also believe you will come to see this yourself in due time. After all, you cannot dislike what you do not know, can you?”
    Sydney could, and did. She had her own plans for her future, and they most definitely did not include being shut up in the house of a reclusive and doubtless eccentric peer in some remote part of Sussex (which was only the next county, but Sydney had never been farther west than Canterbury before). If only things could have remained as they were for just a little longer! But her four Wendt cousins had grown up and left home—Nicky and Jamie to marry and take up their respective practices in medicine and the law, Carl to take orders, and Robin to attend Cambridge with a view to a future parliamentary career. Then Aunt Emma had died, and the jolly bustling household was reduced to one suddenly elderly cleric and his young niece-by-marriage.
    Even then, things might have gone along comfortably between them, but for two circumstances—Sydney’s artistic career and The Letter.
    In a moment of sympathy for her bereaved uncle, Sydney had confided to him her plans to enter some profession, as her cousins had all done or would do. Had she not been educated as they had been? Did she not have even greater talents at the pianoforte and the easel, and in singing—well, perhaps not in singing—and in writing and even acting, as evidenced by the leading parts she had taken in parish theatricals? Did Uncle Augustus not agree that she could earn a living in any one of these occupations, thus allowing him to retire and enjoy his own hobbies in peace for the rest of his days?
    Mr. Wendt had no doubt whatever that Sydney could do anything she set her mind to, but conscious of both the dangers inherent in any such course for a gently reared young woman, and of the unlikelihood of his convincing this particular young woman of those dangers, he had reluctantly agreed to all her talents and allowed her to make what plans she would—all the while praying for some miracle that might turn her from her daily more determined path.
    The miracle appeared unexpectedly among the deceased Mrs. Wendt’s possessions, one morning after Sydney had announced at breakfast that she was “pretty well set’’ on becoming a concert pianist—having decided against being a poet, despite the fortunes lesser talents like Lord Byron appeared to be making at it, when a sonnet she had sent pseudonymously to