Sydney Lisle: The Heiress of St. Quentin

A rainy November afternoon was drawing to its close. The sun had set in a haze of fog, to which it gave a fleeting warmth of colour. The street lamps were lit, and chinks of light showed here and there through the shuttered windows of the tall, dingy houses in a dull old square not far from Euston Station.

Yes, chinks of light were coming from almost every house, casting little gleams of brightness on to the wet pavements and rusty iron bars guarding the areas; but from one, the last in the square, considerably more was to be seen.

Uncertain blobs of light, now broad, now narrow, from the windows of the dining-room, suggested that the curtains were being drawn back impatiently every few minutes, that someone might look out into the uninviting darkness; and at least three times in one half-hour a broad blaze streaming out into the night assured the passers-by that the hall door of Number 20 had been opened wide, despite the fog and rain.

If they had paused at such a moment they might have seen a slender figure, with brown hair blown away from her bright face, and eager eyes that searched the familiar square, regardless of the cold, until a call from within made her slowly close the door and return into the brightness that looked doubly bright after the darkness without.

“Father and Hugh won’t come any the quicker because you send a draught right through the house, dear!” a pleasant-looking girl of two or three-and-twenty remarked, as Sydney came dancing and singing into the shabby school-room after her third unsuccessful journey to the door; “they are hardly ever in before half-past five, you know.”

“It feels like half-past six, at least!” cried Sydney. “Oh, dear! oh, dear! I’ve never known half-past five so awfullylong in coming!”

“Sydney! Sydney!” Mildred said reprovingly, “don’t you remember what mother was saying to you only yesterday? You really must give up slang and schoolgirl ways, now you are going to be eighteen next month, and to put your hair up, and leave off doing proper lessons and——”

“And become a real, celebrated authoress!” shouted Tom, who was despatching bread and butter at the table with a highly satisfactory appetite. “You’ll have to mind your shaky grammar now, Syd.”

“Of course I shan’t be a celebrated authoress quite at once,” said Sydney modestly. “I believe you are usually rather more grown up than eighteen first, and have a little more experience. But it makes one feel ever so much older when one is really going to be in print.”

“And when you’ve earned a whole guinea—twenty-one whole shillings!” little Prissie contributed in an absolutely awestruck voice.

“Read us the letter again, Syd,” Hal demanded, stretching out his long legs to the cheerful blaze. “Go ahead; I really don’t think I took it all in.”

And Sydney, nothing loth, produced that wonderful letter, which had come in quite an ordinary way by the four o’clock post that afternoon, together with an advertisement about a dairy-farm for mother, and an uninteresting-looking envelope for father, with “Lincoln’s Inn” upon the back.

The outside of her letter was quite ordinary-looking too, Sydney had thought, when Fred and Prissie had almost torn the envelope in half, in their anxiety each to have the pleasure of bringing it upstairs to her. Just a narrow envelope, with something stamped upon the back, and her name in very scrawly hand-writing—“Miss Sydney Lisle.”

And then, when she had turned it over several times, and all the Chichester children who were in had had a look at it, and tried to guess what the raised and twisted letters on the back might mean, Sydney had opened it.

And there was a typed letter, and inside the letter a cheque for a guinea—actually a guinea, the largest sum Sydney had ever owned in the course of her seventeen years! She never will forget the wonder and delight of that moment!