"Why, surely, Clary, your father told you----"
She burst into tears. Of all things upon this earth she had loved the grand old mansion where her childhood had been spent. She had so little else to love, poor lonely child, that it was scarcely strange she should attach herself to lifeless things. How fondly she had remembered the old place in all those dreary years of exile, dreaming of it as we dream of some lost friend. And it was gone from her for ever! Her father had bartered away that most precious birthright.
"O, how could he do it! how could he do it!" she cried piteously.
"Why, my dear Clary, you can't suppose it was a matter of choice with him. 'Needs must when'--I daresay you know the vulgar proverb. Necessity has no law. Come, come, my dear, don't cry; your father won't like to see you with red eyes. It was very wrong of him not to tell you about the sale of Arden--excessively wrong. But that's just like Marmaduke Lovel; always ready to shirk anything unpleasant, even to the writing of a disagreeable letter."
"Poor dear papa! I don't wonder he found it hard to write about such a thing; but it would have been better for me to have known. It is such a bitter disappointment to come home and find the dear old place gone from us. Has it been sold very long?"
"About two years. A rich manufacturer bought it--something in the cloth way, I believe. He has retired from business, however, and is said to be overwhelmingly rich. He has spent a great deal of money upon the Court already, and means to spend more I hear."
"Has he spoiled it--modernised it, or anything of that kind?"
"No; I am glad to say that he--or his architect perhaps--has had the good taste to preserve the mediaeval character of the place. He has restored the stonework, renewing all the delicate external tracery where it was lost or decayed, and has treated the interior in the same manner. I have dined with Mr. Granger once or twice since the work was finished, and I must say the place is now one of the finest in Yorkshire--perhaps the finest, in its peculiar way. I doubt if there is so perfect a specimen of gothic domestic architecture in the county."
"And it is gone from us for ever!" said Clarissa, with a profound sigh.