But though they thus left Grove Road in great excitement they were not disappointed. If they had found themselves simply mistaken, and that nothing was known there of their father or his visit, they would have fallen from an eminence of hope, which in present circumstances they had by no means lost. Had they been received with kind indulgence as strangers, rousing no hostile or any other kind of feeling, but simply a little surprise, they would have been cruelly disappointed; but the excitement of seeing themselves regarded with alarm as dangerous intruders, so important as to be perilous to family peace, flattered them in the most subtle way. As they went slowly down the hill, jolting over the stones, their hearts were fluttered by a sense of dignity which they had never felt before. They laid their girlish heads together as they had been longing to do since ever they set foot in that strange enchanted place. What could it be? what solemn inheritance, what great fortune, to justify the panic which they had seen by movements beneath all the glitter and bravado of Miss Anna’s words? Between that exciting and wonderful idea and the associations with their father of which the darkling road seemed full, their minds were transported altogether out of their own trouble and raised into an atmosphere of high interest and responsibility. It would depend, they thought, upon how they now behaved whether their whole position might be changed. They were well off enough; there was no want in their house, nor had they any reason to suppose that their father’s death would leave them destitute. But there was a great difference between that state of ordinary and commonplace comfort, and this dazzling probability. It might have been a vacant principality, almost a throne, from the way in which Grace and Milly contemplated it. They felt as if their former life had been stopped, and that something new, altogether unrealised and unrealisable, awaited them in the future. “If we only knew what to do; if we could only decide on what is best,” Grace said. That was the difficulty now. This morning there had seemed nothing before them but a patient, melancholy waiting for their mother’s sad letter, and the news of her arrangements for their return to her; now they thought no longer of the voyage home or of anything connected with it, but of what to do and say as representatives of their father, and heads, so to speak, of the family, working on their behalf. “It will change everything,” Grace said again thoughtfully. “Instead of all of us being alike, Lenny--Lenny will be the heir. That is one thing that gives a likelihood to it,” she added, sinking her voice as if the cab-driver might perhaps hear and report the matter. “His name, Milly! I never thought of it till a few minutes ago. Lenny; of course he is Leonard; and when you think of it, papa had Leonard in his name too.”