The party in Mrs. Tredethlyn’s opera-box that evening was a very pleasant one. Whatever business had taken Harcourt Lowther to Richmond must have been tolerably satisfactory in its result, for that gentleman’s spirits were gayer than usual as he stood behind Maude’s chair in the shadow of the crimson curtain, talking to her under cover of all those crashing choruses and grand orchestral effects which Meyerbeer must surely have composed with a view to comfortable conversation. Miss Grunderson was gorgeous in thirty guineas worth of blue moiré antique à la Watteau, and exhibited a small fortune in the way of lace and artificial flowers upon her plump little person. Her diamond earrings were the biggest in the opera-house; though it must be confessed that a straw-coloured tint, which the connoisseur repudiates, pervaded the gems that the market-gardener had bought for his daughter—size, rather than purity of water, being the quality for which Mr. Grunderson selected his diamonds. Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between Maude’s simple toilet of white silk and Rosa’s gaudy splendour.

But Miss Grunderson was very happy this evening, for the delightful Roderick condescended to talk to her, while his brother was engrossed by Mrs. Tredethlyn. He was not very polite, but Rosa thought him positively charming. She had learnt to understand the emptiness of the attentions that had been paid to her by enterprising young bachelors, who thought that an alliance with the great Grunderson’s daughter would be a very pleasant starting-point on the high-road of life; but she did not understand that there might come a man wise enough to eschew vain flatteries and all the ordinary allurements of the vulgar fortune-hunter, and yet designing enough to spread his nets for any heiress worthy of his ambition.

In his conversation with the simple-minded Rosa he affected the sentiments of a confirmed misogynist.

“If there were such a possibility as a sensible woman,” he said, “I might perhaps hope to end my days in the bosom of a family; but since the age of miracles is past, I resign myself to the idea of remaining a lonely wanderer until the day of my death.”

Thus, half in despondency, half in bitterness, Roderick Lowther replied to some leading remark of Miss Grunderson’s. She called him a horrid man and a dreadful creature: but she admired him amazingly notwithstanding, and she felt a seraphic happiness in listening to this delightful cynical being, to the utter neglect of Meyerbeer.

“With the exception of public characters,” mused the market-gardener’s daughter, “I don’t think I was ever really in love until now.”

And thus it fell out that, when Mrs. Tredethlyn said, in the course of the evening, that she was going to spend the following day at Twickenham, Rosa gave such broad hints about the loveliness of the weather, and the delights of suburban scenery, that good-natured Maude promised to take her down for a long afternoon among the roses in the dear old garden where so much of her own happy youth had been idled away.

“Are droppers-in to be permitted in your Arcadia, ladies?” demanded Harcourt; “and will the balls and mallets be considered out of place upon the lawn by the river?”

This was quite enough for Miss Grunderson, who cried out directly that of all things in the world she admired croquet, and that “Par” had bought her a set of Cremer’s most exquisite walnut-wood balls and mallets. There were times when the vivacious Rosa called her indulgent parent “Par,” in spite of those half-dozen annual accounts which he had paid for the young lady’s education.

“I shall so enjoy a game of croquet in a real garden!” cried Rosa. “We play it in the square sometimes; but the little boys and the bakers’ and butchers’ young men outside the rails are so dreadfully trying, especially when the balls won’t go where one wants them, owing to nervousness; and I’m sure it’s enough to make anybody nervous to have a strange chimney-sweep calling out, ‘Well done, butter-fingers!’ if one drops a mallet; and that square-keeper is never within sight when wanted.”

“Does Tredethlyn go with you to-morrow?” asked Harcourt Lowther presently; he had been very thoughtful for the last few minutes.

“No,” Maude answered, rather sadly. “I asked Frank to drive me down in the mail-phaeton; but he told me he was going a little way out of town on business.”

She was thinking how very great a change had come to pass since her husband had been her adoring slave, only too happy to follow wherever she pleased to lead him. Now there was no quarrel, no actual misunderstanding between them; but there was quite a wide breach, as if they had agreed to separate after a long series of domestic battles.

“Roderick and I will come down to the Cedars to-morrow,” said Harcourt, bending over Maude’s chair, “unless you forbid us to do so. The river is delightful just now, and you may want the services of a couple of boatmen.”

“We shall be very glad to see you, if you like to come,” Mrs. Tredethlyn answered, carelessly. Looking up just then, she saw Miss Grunderson’s round eyes fixed upon her with a very earnest expression. Rosa had heard all sorts of insinuations respecting Mr. Lowther’s constant attendance upon Mrs. Tredethlyn, and the young lady was wondering whether her darling Maude did really deserve any of the reprobation that had been showered upon her as a flirting matron.

“There’s a way of saying ‘How do you do?’ or ‘Pretty well, thanks,’ that seems like flirting,” mused Miss Grunderson; “and Mr. Lowther always has that way when he talks to Mrs. Tredethlyn. I know she is too good to be a flirt, in spite of all those malicious people may say about her; and I don’t like Harcourt Lowther a bit, for he must know how his flirting manner is talked about, though she doesn’t. I’ve seen half-a-dozen opera-glasses turned this way to-night, just because he’s been bending over her chair in that whispering way of his. And yet he has only been talking of croquet.”

Rosa’s friendship was quite as ardent as her love, and much more lasting. Mrs. Tredethlyn’s gentleness had quite subdued that affectionate little heart, and the market-gardener’s daughter would have been willing to make any effort in her friend’s service. She was a very energetic little girl, with a good deal of that moral courage which is sometimes wanting in more delicate natures. To put the fact in her own words, Rosa was able to speak her mind, and to speak it very freely too, whenever the occasion called for candour.

The next day was one of the brightest in a brilliant July, and Mrs. Tredethlyn’s shell-shaped barouche was waiting before the ponderous stuccoed portico at eleven o’clock. Francis had left the house half an hour before on foot, bent on that mysterious expedition a little way out of town which he took so frequently now. Maude and Julia came down-stairs at a quarter after eleven; and Miss Grunderson skipped up the stone steps two minutes afterwards, with the bluest bonnet and the pinkest parasol in London.

“How do you like the new contrast?” she inquired, twirling the pink parasol triumphantly, when she had adjusted her flounces and furbelows to the best of her ability on the front seat of Mrs. Tredethlyn’s carriage. “I remember, when I was at school, pink and blue together were thought bad taste, but now they’re quite de rigger. Ness pas ker say joli dong? s’p’tite ombrelle?” demanded Miss Grunderson, bursting into French. “Vingt-huit shillings, ma chère! Ness pas trèscher, chère? Et le boutiquier ne voudrait pas prendre un six-sous là dessous, quoique je l’ai marchandé comme un juif,” she added, with a slap-dash rendering of the language which was peculiar to her.

The summer day was delightful, and Maude’s spirits, which had been rather depressed of late, rose with the sunshine and the pure air, as the high-stepping bays left Stuccoville behind them for the pleasant country road, and the rustic odours of suburban gardens. And then, when she found herself amongst her own birds and flower-beds, it was hard to believe that she was no longer a girl, with a girl’s careless happiness in beautiful things. She sat under a great drooping willow, whose lowest branches dipped into the water, and watched her dogs gambolling with Rosa on the grass.

“I was like that, once,” she thought, “before I knew of papa’s difficulties—before I sold myself for money. I fancied that it was a heroic thing to marry the man I did not love, in the hope that my esteem might be some poor repayment of his generous devotion—his noble trust in my father. But I know now that I could do him no baser wrong than become his wife. I know it now, when he himself has learnt to despise and to avoid me, even when I am anxious to win back his regard.”

Yes, it had come to this. Maude Tredethlyn deeply felt her husband’s palpable avoidance of her. So long as he had been slavishly devoted, she had been just a little inclined to despise him; but now that the treasure of an honest man’s love seemed to have slipped away from her, she awoke to the consciousness that it was a treasure, and that she had need to be unhappy in the loss of a jewel that is not given to every woman to possess. She sickened at the thought of the wealth which her marriage had given her, now that it was unsanctified by the love of the giver. Was it gone, that devoted affection which she had held so lightly while it was hers to throw away? She began to understand now how delicate a thing a heart is, even when it beats beneath the rudest breast, and how soon it withers under the blighting influence of disdain. Yes, she had been faithfully loved by an honest man who would have given his very life for her happiness, and she had trifled with his love until it was lost. Queen Guinivere has only one set of diamonds to throw into the river; and when the passion has passed in whose hot impulse she flung them away, the lady is apt to regret her lost jewels.

Miss Desmond and Miss Grunderson trifled with the balls and mallets, while Maude wandered listlessly on the terrace thinking of the breach between herself and her husband. She was still lingering there alone, when Harcourt and Roderick Lowther strolled from the drawing-room on to the lawn. The eldest set about instructing Julia Desmond and Miss Grunderson with regard to the latest and most intricate by-laws of croquet; and the younger made his way at once to the terrace where Maude was walking listlessly and slowly under a coquettish white umbrella.

Harcourt Lowther took care that Mrs. Tredethlyn had no more time for solitary musing. He brought all his talents to bear to keep her amused, and by the aid of fashionable small-talk, sharp little criticisms on new books, croquet, luncheon, and an incursion among Mr. Hillary’s hothouses, he contrived to chase the shadow of care quite away from the young wife’s girlish brow. It was about four o’clock, and the afternoon had lapsed into a sultry sleepy brightness that was almost oppressive even in that green retreat beside the river, when the two gentlemen suggested the water.

“Of all things in the world the most delightful!” screamed Miss Grunderson. “Oh, do please take us out in one of those darling little dangerous-looking boats I saw in the Swiss boat-house down there. And oh, what a pity I didn’t wear a hat instead of this odious blue bonnet, which is beginning to fly already!” said Rosa, looking despondently at the expansive ribands fluttering below her double chin, which had lost some little of their azure intensity under the influence of the July sun. To Miss Grunderson’s great delight, the two gentlemen proceeded forthwith to the boat-house, and lowered a couple of wherries, as perfect in their way as any craft that ever came out of the hands of Messrs. Messenger. Harcourt placed Mrs. Tredethlyn and Julia Desmond in one of these boats, and to the other descended Miss Grunderson, with more small shrieks of terror and feminine skirmishing, and a greater display of Balmoral boots and embroidered flounces than was absolutely necessary to the embarkation.

“I never get into a boat without thinking I shall be drowned,” said Rosa, plumping down upon the cushions, and all but upsetting herself at the first start; “the water does give way so. But if one was drowned, it would be rather nice to have a paragraph all to one’s self in the daily newspapers, or perhaps what pa calls a social leader, beginning with something about the Moloch Pleasure having swallowed another victim, and Youth at the prow and Pleasure at the helm, and the Pale Horse, and so on.”

And then Miss Grunderson, finding herself quite alone with the latest object of her adoration, exerted all her small fascinations to beguile the woman-hater from his stern aversion to her sex. She chattered as gaily as some talking-bird; and Roderick Lowther, who imagined that he had by this time established himself firmly as a disinterested individual, condescended to make himself agreeable, and to drift into that pleasant current of meaningless small-talk which malicious people call flirtation.

While Roderick rowed his fair companion swiftly past the verdant bank, Harcourt let his boat drift slowly down with the current, only dipping his oars now and then in the intervals of his discourse. Maude had forgotten her troubled reverie upon the terrace, and gave herself up to the enjoyment of all the old talk about books and music, poetry and painting, which had been so delicious to her in those departed days when she and Harcourt had drifted down that same river plighted husband and wife. There is no monitor so sharp as rural nature when we have need to be reminded of our inconstancy. Looking at those reedy banks, those tranquil gardens sloping to a tranquil tide, Maude found it almost difficult to believe in the changes of her life since she had first floated down that stream, a child, with wild-flowers in her lap, and her little bare arm hanging across the edge of the boat, for the infantile pleasure of splashing.

Harcourt Lowther found his brother’s boat moored to a little quay in a shady corner of the river below the Star and Garter, and the splendid colouring of Miss Grunderson’s toilet made that young lady conspicuous as she ascended a little pathway sloping upwards to the terrace, attended by her cavalier. Harcourt shipped his oars, and proposed a stroll in the Petersham meadows. Maude looked at her watch; it was a quarter to five, and Mr. Hillary’s dinner-hour was half-past seven. There was plenty of time for a stroll across those verdant meadows, and Mrs. Tredethlyn, having the interval to dispose of somehow, had only to choose in wasting it in this way or in some other fashion. Harcourt had his wish therefore. He assisted the two ladies to disembark, gave his coat into the custody of one of the lounging watermen at the rustic landing-stage, and then strolled with his two companions into the meadows leading towards Petersham.

There is little need to tell the English reader what Petersham is like. Almost everybody knows that rural cluster of modern villas and grand old red brick mansions nestling so comfortably under the shadow of Richmond Hill. Surely the next best thing to inhabiting Earl Russell’s house in Richmond Park, or that magic château of Monsieur Fould’s, hidden deep in the woody heart of grand old St. Germain’s, would be to own one of those Georgian mansions at Petersham, with cool fishponds and shady gardens, long ranges of narrow windows, and a marble-paved vestibule, with a ceiling by Thornhill, and old family portraits by polite Sir Joshua himself. It was the afternoon of afternoons for listless dawdling about such a place as Petersham, and Mr. Lowther and the two ladies were alike enthusiastic in their admiration of the Georgian mansions.

“I wish Francis would buy a nice old house down here,” said Maude. “I am so tired of London; it is all the same thing over, and over, and over again; the same flock of sheep jumping through the same gap in the same hedge, and not one of them—no, not even the leader—knowing why they do it. I should be near papa here, and all my old friends. In town I seem to know everybody, and yet not to have a single friend.”

There was a rustic bench in the lane through which they were walking as Maude said this. The two ladies sat down to rest for a few minutes, and Harcourt Lowther took out his cigar-case.

“I shall leave you just long enough to smoke a cigarette,” he said, “and then I will take you back to the water-side by a still prettier road, if you like.”

He went away at a leisurely pace, lighting his cigar as he went; but he walked a good deal faster when he was out of Maude Tredethlyn’s ken, and he was flushed with heat when he returned after a quarter of an hour’s absence.

“Now, ladies,” he said, “if we are not to keep Mr. Hillary waiting for his dinner, it is high time for us to go back to the boat.”

Maude and Julia rose, and the little party strolled into the road at the end of the lane in the straggling order usual to people who walk for their own pleasure in a country village. Mrs. Tredethlyn’s white umbrella was a little way ahead of her companions, when Harcourt Lowther laid his gloved hand lightly upon Julia’s shoulder.

She looked up at him, startled by the gesture.

“You have had some reason to complain of your friend Miss Hillary and Francis Tredethlyn,” he said. “I am going to give you your revenge.”

Julia stared in amazement at the speaker; but he did not wait to be interrogated.

“Come, Mrs. Tredethlyn,” he said, “your papa will have to wait for his dinner, unless you walk a little faster.”

He had not much reason to complain of Maude, who had been ahead of him until this moment, but he hurried her along the dusty road until, at a spot where it curved round to the river, he stopped suddenly, pointing to a cottage-garden, seen through the iron rails of a high old-fashioned gate set in a framework of clematis.

“Look at that, Mrs. Tredethlyn! Isn’t it a pretty picture?”

It was a little rustic tableau composed of two figures grouped under a mulberry-tree,—a delicate-looking woman, with soft brown hair, touched here and there with a glimmer of gold, seated on a rustic bench. Her face was turned away from the road, and she was looking up at a man who leaned against the trunk of a tree. It was only a glimpse of this picture which Maude caught between the iron scroll-work of the gate, but she saw quite enough.

The man was Francis Tredethlyn.

“Great Heaven!” exclaimed Harcourt Lowther, in an audible whisper; “it is Francis!”

Maude looked at him with a vague alarm in her face, which had grown almost as white as the umbrella that sheltered it. Harcourt’s whisper had frightened her a hundredfold more than the sight of her husband, at home in that unknown garden with a woman she had never seen or heard of.

“Who is that lady?” she asked, when they had passed the gate. “Do you know her, Mr. Lowther? You know all my husband’s associates much better than I do.”

She tried to speak quite calmly, but failed miserably in the effort. Harcourt’s whisper had expressed so much.

“No, I do not know the lady,” he answered, gravely. “I think you had better make no inquiries about her. Mr. Tredethlyn did not tell you that he was to spend the day at Petersham?”

“No. He only said that he was going a little way out of town.”

“Then in that case it will be better for you to leave him to finish his day as he pleases, since you have made no arrangement for meeting him here, and do not know the lady.”

Maude did not answer him just then. She walked on a little faster than before; and Harcourt kept by her side, looking furtively every now and then at the pale profile, the tremulous lower lip. He could see that Mrs. Tredethlyn was profoundly agitated, and that she was trying to conceal her agitation. He could see this; and he was determined to make her speak, and speak freely.

“She is not the sort of woman to suffer in silence,” he thought. “This kind of trouble is new to her, and she will cry out presently.”

Mr. Lowther was not very much at fault in his estimate of Maude’s heroism. She spoke to him when they were a few paces from Julia, whose face was lighted by a look of triumph under her gauzy veil.

“You say you do not know that lady. You must at least know who she is?”

This was said in a tone of almost piteous entreaty.

“Upon my honour, no,” Harcourt answered, gravely.

There was a pause for some moments. They were in one of the meadows by this time, nearing the water’s edge, Julia still in the rear, and Maude still walking very fast, as it is the habit of most people to walk under the influence of agitation. Perhaps in that unreasoning, unnecessary haste, there lurks a vague fancy that we can hurry away from our trouble.

All at once Maude turned to Harcourt Lowther and laid her hand upon his arm.

“Tell me what it all means,” she cried,—“tell me the worst, however bad it is. I know that you are hiding something from me. I know by your manner just now that there is some horrible meaning in Frank’s presence in that garden with that woman.”

“My dear Mrs. Tredethlyn, you ask me to interfere in a matter which I have no right to approach. It may be everything to you where your husband goes,—whom he associates with. I have been his friend,—for your sake; and I have done my best to steer him clear of dangerous acquaintance and dangerous amusements—still for your sake. I may have found it a hard matter to keep him out of mischief, and may have regretted the natural tendencies of his character—always for your sake. Beyond this I can have nothing to do with him. I had good reason for being sorry when you married him—on my own account. Of late I have been even more sorry—on yours.”

Maude looked at him, white and trembling. The schemer was pleased to see what deadly mischief had been done, and yet stung to the very heart to find that any falsehood of his victim’s could wound so deeply. There are triumphs which have a shadow of humiliation upon their brightness, and this was one of them. Julia, seeing that her companions were loitering, seated herself on the lower step of a stile. She had no desire to interrupt this conversation.

“Speak to me plainly,” Mrs. Tredethlyn cried, passionately, “or I will go back to that cottage and ask my husband himself for an explanation. Perhaps that would be best. He has a better right to explain his conduct than any one else.”

She walked a few paces from her companion; but Harcourt Lowther followed her, and caught her gently by the arm.

“Will Francis Tredethlyn tell you the truth if you question him?” he asked. “My dear Mrs. Tredethlyn, how could you endure the esclandre of such a scene as must ensue if you go back to that house, and confront your husband in the presence of that woman?”

“Why should there be a scene, or any esclandre? The lady may be the wife or daughter of some friend of my husband’s. Have I any right to imagine something horrible because I see Frank with a person who is a stranger to me? It was only your manner that frightened me.”

“I am very sorry my manner was so foolish. Let us drop the subject. Only—take my advice—don’t go back to that house.”

“Why should I not, if my husband is innocent? as I am sure he is.”

Mr. Lowther shrugged his shoulders.

“Because it is an unpleasant thing to intrude where one is not invited,” he answered. “Whatever questions you wish to ask your husband can be reserved until you are both at home; and in the meantime pray let the matter drop. Believe me, it is not a fit subject for discussion between you and me.”

There are lawyers who generally inaugurate a consultation by advising their clients not to go to law. They know it is a very safe display of magnanimity. It is only the old story of standing on the shore to reason with a tempestuous ocean, or interfering with the appetite of a famished wolf in favour of the lamb on which he means to dine. To try to restrain a woman whose jealousy has once been aroused from any investigation of her fancied wrongs, is no less wasted labour; and Harcourt Lowther knew quite enough of human nature to be very sure of this.

Mrs. Tredethlyn turned upon him fiercely. He had never seen the woman he loved in a passion until this moment; and though he had so much else to employ his thoughts just now, he could not help pausing for a moment to think now beautiful she looked with that new light in her eyes, that feverish glow so suddenly kindled in the cheeks that had been deadly pale.

“I will not let the matter drop,” she cried. “You are keeping some hideous secret hidden from me. I know you are. I could not be mistaken in your tone just now when you saw Francis in that garden. If there were no harm in his being there, why should you express such amazement? Harcourt Lowther, we were friends once, and you affect to be my friend now. If you are what you pretend to be, tell me the meaning of my husband’s conduct?”

“You love him very much, Maude, to feel his conduct so deeply.”

She was too agitated to notice that her old lover had called her by her Christian name. He had perhaps been scarcely aware of it himself. He loved her better at this moment than he had ever loved her in his life, now that she stood before him a beautiful, angry, passionate creature, appealing to him against the husband for whose sake he had been jilted.

“You must be very much in love with your husband,” he repeated, bitterly; “and yet I should have scarcely thought it possible you could care for that sort of person.”

“He is my husband,” answered Maude, “and I have a right to be angry if he does any wrong.”

“I acknowledge your right to be as angry as you please, but I am sorry to see you so agitated. I am very sorry we happened to walk this way.”

“Will you tell me the truth? I have appealed to you by our old friendship. I shall never again believe in you as a friend unless you speak plainly to-day.”

“If you say that, you oblige me to speak. Will you take my arm, and walk up and down by the hedge yonder? I see people coming into the meadow, and we look rather conspicuous standing just here.”

Mrs. Tredethlyn accepted the proffered arm. Harcourt Lowther was silent for some moments, while they strolled slowly under the shadow of a tall hawthorn hedge. He was waiting until Maude should have recovered some little calmness, and be in a condition to appreciate the full value of what he was going to say.

“It would be going over very old ground, and awakening very bitter recollections—on my part, at least,” he began at last, in a subdued and pensive tone, “were I to tell you what I thought of your marriage with Francis Tredethlyn. When I thought of it most mildly, I believed it the maddest sacrifice that was ever made to the Moloch Wealth since this world began. You had your reasons, you told me, and they were very powerful reasons, but they were to be kept a secret. I had no more to say. All I could do was to hope that you might not be utterly miserable with the man you married—to my mind, the man of all others least adapted to make you a happy wife. I should have done well had I been wise enough to keep aloof from you and your husband after that unhappy marriage. I was so mad as to hang about your house, and accept the friendship of my rival, in the belief that I might save the vessel wherein you had embarked from some of those rocks which I saw a little ahead of the calm bay whence you sailed, with all the stereotyped paraphernalia of pennants flying and guns firing. I have saved you from a good deal; but I have not been able to change your husband’s nature, and he has taken his own way in spite of me.”

“What do you mean?” Maude demanded, breathlessly.

“I cannot, and will not, enter into the details of Francis Tredethlyn’s life for the last twelve months. No, Maude, not even your entreaties shall wring from me more than I have a right to tell, or you to hear. And if I spoke the plainest words that ever sullied a woman’s ear, I should only be talking a strange language which would convey no meaning to your innocent mind. There are places in London whose names you have never heard in your life—places whose very existence might never be known to honest people, if men did not write about them in the newspapers; and amongst the habitués of those places your husband has been conspicuous since the first week of his return from the village where you and he spent your honeymoon. There are dinners given, up at that hotel yonder, to women whose costume is an extravagant copy of yours, but who in everything except their dress differ from you as entirely as darkness differs from light; and Francis Tredethlyn has been foremost amongst the dinner-givers ever since he has had a fortune to squander. So long as he was amused by open follies and dissipations I cherished a lingering hope that custom would bring weariness, and that the very monotony of these poisonous pleasures would render them their own antidote. I made excuses for the man who had so newly succeeded to a fortune large enough to intoxicate a weak brain; and I fancied when the novelty of his wealth had ceased to bewilder him, he would awake to a bitter sense of the degrading path in which he was treading. I thought this, Maude, and I believed also that your loveliness, your purity, rendered all the more obvious by contrast with the people among whom he wasted his life, must lure him back to your side. How could I think otherwise than this?—I, who had loved and lost you!”

It never occurred to Mrs. Tredethlyn that these were the very last words that Harcourt Lowther should have spoken to her, at this moment above all other moments. It seemed as if she scarcely heard this allusion to the past, any more than she had heard her old lover’s frequent utterance of her Christian name.

“I think my husband loved me—once,” she murmured in a low sorrowful voice. “He was so noble in his conduct—so generous to my father.”

“My poor girl,” exclaimed Harcourt, with supreme compassion, “how should you know the difference between a good man’s generosity and a profligate’s lavish bid for the fair young bride who happens to be the fancy of a moment? There are men who will give as exaggerated a price for a picture as ever Francis Tredethlyn offered when he won you for his wife; but you would scarcely call a man ‘generous’ because he bid extravagantly for a Raffaelle or a Murillo at Christie’s. There is no creature in this world so selfish as a profligate.”

Maude turned sick and cold to the very heart as Mr. Lowther said this.

A profligate! The horrible word wounded her like the stroke of a knife. In a moment this innocent girl, who until now had only known the existence of “profligacy” as an unspeakable noun substantive hidden away somewhere in the close columns of unexpurgated dictionaries, felt the veil rudely torn from the purity of her mind; and was told that her husband—the other part of herself, united to her by the solemn service of the Church—was the obnoxious thing which until this hour no one had ever dared to name in her presence. The generosity she had believed in was a sham. The noble nature which had commanded her regard and esteem, even when it could not win her love, had never existed out of her own imagination. She had been wronged, betrayed, humiliated; while in her schoolgirl simplicity she had been lamenting her unworthiness of a devoted husband’s love. She had been bought for money like a slave in some Oriental market-place, when she had imagined herself a free sacrifice offered as the recompense of a sacred debt.

She did not speak; but looking at her face Harcourt Lowther saw that his words had gone home. The breach between husband and wife yawned wide enough now. The undermining of the ground had been slow, laborious work, but the result repaid this social engineer for all his trouble. With what a crash the earth fell in when it was time for the convulsion! So some huge mass of Kentish chalk, which sappers and miners have been manipulating for a month or so, and at which a crowd of tired spectators have been straining hopelessly for two hours at a stretch, breaks away all at once from the bosom of the cliff with a thunderous noise, and crumbles into powder.

But Mr. Lowther had not finished yet.

It was a long time before Maude answered him; and then she said, very slowly, and with a painful effort—

“I thank you—for having told me the truth. It is always best to know the truth.”

After this there was no more said between Harcourt Lowther and Mrs. Tredethlyn upon the subject of her husband’s delinquencies. They walked slowly back to the stile, where Julia was sitting as quietly as if she had been that monumental Patience of whom the poet has told us. There is something wonderfully expressive in natural pantomime; and Miss Desmond, sitting on that rustic stile tracing figures from Euclid on the dusty pathway under her feet with the ivory point of her parasol, had yet contrived to keep a sharp watch upon those two people on the other side of the meadow, and to form a tolerably clear idea as to the gist of their conversation.

“Julia dear,” Maude said, wearily, as they walked to the river-side, “would you mind going back to town as soon as we can get to the carriage? I have such an intolerable headache, that I’m sure I shall be quite unfit to dine with papa.”

Of course Julia declared that dining in London or at the Cedars was equally indifferent to her. It was very often her humour to affect the dull characterless manner of a paid dependant; and it was her humour to do so just now.

“I am afraid Mr. Lowther and I have kept you waiting an unconscionable time,” said Maude, looking at her watch.

“Not at all,” replied Miss Desmond; “I rather like waiting.”

Roderick Lowther and Miss Grunderson were loitering at the little landing-stage; the young lady’s showy draperies pre-Raffaelite in the sharp edges which she exhibited against the hot blue sky.

“Oh, you darling Mrs. Tredethlyn!” exclaimed Rosa; “I thought you never were coming. If your pa is half as particular about his dinner as mine is, won’t he be cross with us all! It’s close upon seven o’clock!”

Maude looked piteously at Harcourt Lowther. He understood that appealing glance.

“I have given Mrs. Tredethlyn a violent headache by putting her in an awningless boat under a broiling sun,” he said, “and then beguiling her into a fatiguing walk; and I deserve to be horsewhipped for my stupidity. If you have any regard for your friend’s health, Miss Grunderson, you will forego the pleasure of dining with Mr. Hillary, and get her home as quietly as you can.”

Rosa Grunderson might be silly, but she was by no means stupid; and, looking at Maude’s ashen face, she saw that something more than a headache had caused the change in her friend. She saw this; and that vague distrust which she felt about the brother of the man she adored shaped itself into a positive dislike.

“That Mr. Lowther has been saying something to annoy her,” thought Miss Grunderson; “and I hate him. What business has he to be always dancing attendance upon her instead of her husband? And now he’s not content with getting her talked about, so he must needs go and make her unhappy, poor darling.”

Thus mused the meditative Rosa, while Roderick Lowther rowed her homeward over the placid water. The diplomatist’s fascinations were almost thrown away upon her during this brief journey from Richmond to the Cedars, although he had progressed so far in Miss Grunderson’s affections during a leisurely promenade on the terrace, that he had serious thoughts of calling on Grunderson père within the week to make a formal offer for the young lady’s hand and fortune.

“I have no idea of wasting my time and trouble upon the girl, to find myself thrown out at the last moment by the impracticable parent,” thought Roderick, as he shot through the water with that long deliberate stroke for which the Oxonians are celebrated. “I must know exactly where I am, before I devote myself to the plump Rosa. There must be no nonsense about settlements and so forth. I won’t have any legal brick wall and chevaux de frise between me and my wife’s fortune. A man doesn’t quarter a cabbage with the arms of the oldest untitled family in Hampshire without getting well paid for the humiliation. I must understand what I’m going in for, when I propose to my charming Rosa.”

“It was foolish of you to go on the water in the hottest part of the day, darling,” he said; “and I’m afraid you are going out a little too much in town; but the season will soon be over, and I suppose you will be leaving London.”

Mrs. Tredethlyn murmured something unintelligible, and the barouche rolled away. She saw her father and the two Lowthers standing on the wide stone steps dimly through a mist, athwart which the group seemed only a confusion of familiar faces and dark garments; and then she found herself driving Londonwards through the still evening, with Julia by her side, and Rosa’s anxious face opposite to her.

She accepted unquestioningly all that Harcourt Lowther had told her. Her husband was false to her. There was so much in Francis Tredethlyn’s life since his marriage which seemed an evidence of his accuser’s truth. And then Harcourt had not wished to accuse. The cruel revelation had been extorted from him. No trouble that Maude had ever yet endured had been so bitter as that which had come upon her to-day,—the shame, the humiliation, the unutterable horror of that discovery made in the summer sunshine, amidst the perfume of flowers, the joyous carolling of a skylark high up in the warm blue sky. She did not love her husband; and the agony which gnawed her breast during this homeward journey was the sharp pang which belongs to wounded pride rather than to betrayed affection. At least this was what she said to herself, as she remembered, with an angry flush upon her brow, those sneering remarks of Mr. Lowther’s about her love for such a man as Francis Tredethlyn.

“I do believe he loved me once, let Harcourt Lowther say what he will; and he was nobly generous to my father; and now he deserts me altogether, and devotes himself to some horrible woman!” thought Mrs. Tredethlyn, whose ideas were not particularly sequential this evening.

She meditated upon so much as she knew of the life that Francis had led since the close of his honeymoon. His late hours, his frequent absences, all seemed to confirm Harcourt’s account of dissipated habits and degraded tastes.

Yes, everything combined to prove the miserable truth. She was a neglected wife; abandoned by the man who had once seemed the veriest slave that ever bowed beneath the supreme dominion of Love. She remembered what he had been, or what she had believed him to be, and was all the more indignant with him for the discoveries of to-day. Rosa Grunderson, anxiously watching Mrs. Tredethlyn in the twilight, wondered that so dark a cloud could overshadow the fair face of her friend.

“It must be something very dreadful,” thought Rosa; “but whatever it is, that Mr. Lowther is at the bottom of it. If Roderick does propose,—which I’ve every reason to think he will, from the way he conducted himself on the terrace,—and he and pa can come to any arrangement about me, I won’t have much to do with my brother-in-law, that’s certain, for I hate him. But I dare say those horrid ground-rents will always stand in the way of my being married to anybody but a Rothschild; and Rothschilds don’t trouble themselves about ground-rents.”

The drive from Twickenham to Stuccoville is not a very long one; and Mrs. Tredethlyn’s bays got over the ground at a pace that did credit to the judgment of Mr. Lowther, who had chosen the horses for his friend. It was nearly nine o’clock when the barouche drew up before the Doric colonnade which imparted a funereal darkness to Maude’s dining-room; and before the three ladies could alight, a hansom cab dashed up to the kerbstone, a pair of slamming doors were flung open, and Francis Tredethlyn sprang out upon the pavement.

His wife’s face flushed crimson, and then grew deadly pale. She turned to Rosa Grunderson, and murmured in faint, broken accents: “Will you dine with us, Rosa? or shall Martin drive you home?”

“Thank you, darling,” Miss Grunderson answered promptly; “I think I’ll come in for just a few moments. Pa will have gone to the Bell and—to his club by this time,” added Rosa, whose parent was wont to spend his evenings in the parlour of a very respectable tavern in the Brompton Road, where he and several other worthies assembled nightly to discuss the affairs of the nation amidst the fumes of their cigars, the primitive clay being strictly tabooed in that select little coterie.

Maude alighted and entered the hall. Francis had handed her from the carriage, and followed her into the house. He threw away his cigar as he stepped into the hall, and approached his wife radiant with good spirits and perfumed with tobacco.

“I’m so glad you’ve come home,” he said. “I thought you were going to dine with the governor, and that I should have to sit in that dreary room all by myself, with only Landseer’s staghounds to keep me company; though if half the people one calls company were as much alive as they are, a dinner-party wouldn’t be such a dismal business as it is. Of course you haven’t dined; no more have I; and unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any dinner,” added Mr. Tredethlyn, as he opened the door and looked into the dining-room, where the table was blank and ghastly under a faint glimmer of gas. “No one was expected, I suppose? However, they can get us something. Geoffreys, just see about dinner, will you? How do you do, Miss Grunderson? I dare say you’re hungry after your drive. Are you going up-stairs, Maude?”

“Yes,” answered Mrs. Tredethlyn. The syllable had a startling effect as it fell from her lips, like one solitary drop of hail falling suddenly on a summer day.

“I am going up-stairs,” said Miss Desmond confidentially to Rosa; “will you come with me, and take off your things?”

“No, thanks, dear,” answered Miss Grunderson, who would have endured tortures rather than say “thank you,” when fashion required that she should say “thanks.” “I don’t think I will take off my things. Mrs. Tredethlyn doesn’t seem very well; and it’s almost too late for dinner; so I think I’ll just go up to the morning-room, and rest for a few minutes before I go home. The carriage needn’t be kept, you know, please,” added Miss Grunderson, to a male domestic hovering in the shadowy depths of the hall; “for I can have a cab fetched when I want to go.”

Mr. Tredethlyn had followed his wife to the drawing-room; and the two girls standing at the foot of the staircase heard one of the doors close with a sonorous bang.

Miss Desmond went up-stairs, and Miss Grunderson followed slowly. The morning-room of which Rosa had spoken was on the second floor; but the young lady did not go any farther than the first landing-place. The door of the front drawing-room was closed, but the doors of the back drawing-room stood wide open; and peering into the lighted apartment, Rosa saw that it was quite empty. She paused for a moment, looked about her; and then went quietly into the back drawing-room, and closed the door very softly behind her.

“Maude,” he said, as he closed the drawing-room door, “you speak to me and look at me as if you were offended. And yet I have no consciousness of having done anything to displease you.”

Mrs. Tredethlyn looked at her husband with supreme contempt; not the cool scorn which is akin to indifference, but rather a passionate disdainfulness. Taking into consideration the fact that Maude did not care for her husband, all this feminine rage seemed a sad waste of feeling.

“Do not add hypocrisy to the wrong you have done me,” said Mrs. Tredethlyn. “I have been most cruelly awakened this day to a knowledge of the life you have been leading—ever since our marriage. I cannot speak of this subject; it is too horrible; I think the words would choke me. I thought that I should have been able to write what I had to tell you; but since I have been so unfortunate as to meet you, I may as well say with my own lips what I meant to have said in a letter. It is very little. I have only to tell you that from this moment we must be strangers to each other. After my discoveries of to-day, I should consider myself a base and degraded creature if I ever suffered your hand to touch mine in friendship again. The obligation of my father’s debt to you must rest upon him henceforward, and not upon me.”

“But, Maude, explain yourself!—your discovery of to-day, you say! What discovery?”

“Your affectation of unconsciousness is a deeper insult than your—No, I will not discuss this subject with you!” cried Maude, passionately. “It is shameful—it is cruel—that I should have been wronged so basely, when I trusted you so completely. Do not speak to me; do not touch me!” she exclaimed, shrinking away from him with a shudder; “your presence inspires me with disgust and abhorrence. Why do you make any poor pretence of inhabiting this house, which has only afforded you an ostensible shelter, while your amusements and your friends have been found elsewhere? I set you free from this hour, Mr. Tredethlyn. Seek for happiness after your own fashion; where you please. I have nothing more to say to you.”

She swept from the room before her husband could arrest her. Unspeakably bewildered by her passionate words, which were almost meaningless to him, Francis Tredethlyn stood motionless as a statue a few paces from the doorway by which his wife had just left him. He was standing thus when the voluminous curtains which were drawn across the archway between the drawing-rooms were cautiously divided, and a plump little figure in blue muslin appeared among the amber drapery. The Cornishman heard the rustling, and turned abruptly towards the portière.

“Yes,” exclaimed Miss Grunderson, “it’s me; no, it’s I!—but, goodness gracious, what does it matter about grammar, when there’s so much trouble in the world?—yes, and I’ve been listening,” continued the young lady, answering Mr. Tredethlyn’s inquiring stare; “and I know that listening in a general way is considered mean; but I think the amount of pa’s ground-rents ought to exempt me from any imputation of meanness. If I didn’t love that sweet lamb so dearly; and if I hadn’t a very sincere regard for you, Mr. Tredethlyn,—having come into money suddenly myself, and knowing how trying it is to carry it off carelessly, and not look as if one was always conscious of being richer than other people;—if I didn’t—in short, I shouldn’t have stopped behind those curtains,—and run the risk of being considered a sneak and a listener. But do say that you forgive me, please, and believe that I meant it for the best?” pleaded Rosa, whose diction was apt to become rather obscure under the influence of excitement.

“What, in Heaven’s name, does it all mean, Miss Grunderson?” asked Francis, piteously.

He was ready to cling to the frailest spar by which he might float on the wide ocean of perplexity, whose billows had so suddenly encompassed him.

“Goodness gracious knows—I don’t any more than the dead though if there is anything in drawing-room tables balancing themselves on tip-toe and great-coats flying about the room like awkward birds the dead may know more than we give them credit for,” exclaimed the lively Rosa, without a single stop; “but it’s very certain there is something wrong, and whatever it is, that Mr. Lowther is at the bottom of it.”

“Harcourt Lowther?”

“Yes. My pa hears a great deal of gossip at the Bell and—at clubs, and such places; and he always tells me everything he hears. And oh, Mr. Tredethlyn, if you knew how long I have wished to speak my mind to you, I am sure you would forgive me for listening just now.”

“My dear Miss Grunderson, what could you have to say to me?” asked the bewildered Cornishman.

“Oh, lots of things. But then you know the grand maxim in society is that you mustn’t speak your mind. It’s like that Latin person’s rule of nil thingamy; you mustn’t admire any thing, you know; and so on. And one must unlearn all one’s Catechism, about loving one’s neighbour as oneself, and doing unto others as one would they should—which always reminds me of a winter Sunday afternoon at school and broken chilblains, because one did break once while I was saying it. And you see in society the thing is to let your neighbour go his way and to go yours, and to say, ‘Bless my soul! exactly as I anticipated; paw creatchaw!’ if your neighbour tumbles over a precipice, from which it would be the very worst of bad manners to hold him back; and in society, if you saw the good Samaritan—no, the other person—lying wounded in the road, it would be a dreadful incon—what it’s name?—to pick him up and take him to an inn and pay for his lodging, because he might call you to account for your impertinent officiousness as soon as he got well. So, though I have been bursting to speak my mind almost ever since I’ve known you, Mr. Tredethlyn, I’ve held my tongue until to-night. But to-night the climax has come, and I must speak. Oh, you poor dear thing!” cried Rosa, in a sudden outburst of sympathy, “how you and your wife have been talked about!”

“Talked about!—by whom, when, and where?”

“By everybody, always, everywhere. You don’t know—though you ought to know, if you ever listened to what was going on around you—how people do talk. They’ve talked about your dissipation, the hours you have kept, the places you have been seen at, the people you have been seen with; about your coming home in hansom cabs in the middle of the night; and I think if quieter vehicles could be invented for people who stay out late, or at least the doors made to open differently, there wouldn’t be so much scandal. They’ve talked about your getting tipsy,” exclaimed Rosa, shaking her head solemnly, and laying a tremendous stress upon the obnoxious word; “and they’ve said you were drinking yourself into an early grave, and that Harcourt Lowther was leading you on to your death in order that he might marry your wife afterwards.”

“Harcourt lead me—to my death—and—marry Maude! Oh, no, no, no; it is too horrible!” gasped Francis, staring at Miss Grunderson, with his head clasped in his hands, and big beads of perspiration upon his brow.

“I know it is,” answered Rosa; “but they say it; and you must own it was not a wise thing for you to be so very intimate with a man who was engaged to your wife before you married her.”

“Engaged to my wife! Who was engaged to my wife?”

“Why, Harcourt Lowther, of course! Didn’t you know all about it?”

“No, so help me Heaven!”

Miss Grunderson looked very grave. All that she had said had been spoken in perfect good faith; but, all at once, she began to see that mischief might come of this free utterance of her thoughts.

“I thought that you knew it,” she stammered in considerable confusion, “or I’m sure I should never have said one word about—”

“How did you come to know it?” asked Francis, turning fiercely upon the terrified Rosa.

“Miss Desmond told me.”

“It is a lie, a malicious lie, invented by Julia Desmond!”

“I dare say it is something in the way of a story,” responded Miss Grunderson, who was very anxious to extinguish the sudden conflagration which her unconscious hand had fired; “people do tell such stories, you know; not that I think Miss Desmond would speak so positively unless—but I’m sure if Mrs. Tredethlyn was ever engaged to Mr. Lowther, she had quite forgotten him when she married you; only if it was so, I don’t think it was quite honourable of him to be so friendly with you without telling you all about it.”

Thus Miss Grunderson—floundering helplessly in a conversational quagmire—endeavoured to undo any mischief which her indiscretion might have made. But Francis was not listening to her; he was thinking of all his life during the last year, and a host of trifling circumstances recurred to his mind, in evidence against the wife he had loved, and the friend he had trusted.

“Yes,” he thought, as he sank moodily down into the nearest chair, and covered his face with his hands, as heedless of Miss Grunderson’s presence as if that young lady had been one of her father’s cabbages,—“yes, it is no lie of Julia Desmond’s. A hundred recollections arise in my mind to bear witness to its truth. Maude’s confession about the some one whom she had loved, but whose poverty was a hindrance to a marriage with her. Harcourt Lowther’s letters from that beautiful heiress, whose father’s wealth stood between him and happiness. I knew that they had known each other before he sailed for Van Diemen’s Land; but I believed him implicitly when he told me casually one day that they had never been more than the most indifferent acquaintances. He had a careless, half-contemptuous way of talking of my wife that galled me to the quick, and that I have sometimes resented. Fool and dupe that I was! That affected cynicism, that pretended indifference, was only a part of his scheme. He loved her all the time; and while with one hand he pushed me away from her into the drunken orgies that only kill a little more slowly than the secret doses of the assassin, with the other he held fast the chain that bound him to her; waiting till he should be able to say, ‘You are free, and I claim the fulfilment of your broken promise. You are enriched by the death of the poor dupe who loved you, and poverty need separate us no longer.’ Oh, God of Heaven, what a fool I have been! and how clearly I can see my folly, now when it is too late! False wife, false friend! so deeply, fondly loved, so blindly trusted. I can remember my wife’s face the day she spoke to me of Harcourt Lowther. Has she been in the base plot against me? No, I will not believe it. If I have been this man’s blind dupe, his helpless tool, she may have been as blind, as helpless as myself. O God, give me strength to trust her still, for my heart must break if she is base and cruel.”

A man’s ideas are not apt to arrange themselves very consecutively at such a time; but it was something after this fashion that Francis Tredethlyn reflected upon his friend’s treachery, while Rosa stood by watching him very anxiously, with that fiery eagerness which had prompted her to speak her mind considerably cooled down by the aspect of her companion’s distress.

“Miss Grunderson,” said Francis presently, “whatever the world may have said against Harcourt Lowther, it is a false and lying world if it ever slandered the goodness and purity of my wife.”

“I know that,” answered Rosa, becoming energetic once more; “for of all the sweet darlings that ever were, she’s the sweetest and the dearest. And how should she know that people made nasty disagreeable remarks about Mr. Lowther’s always happening to go to the parties she went to and calling here oftener than other people, and so on—”

“He went to parties!” cried Francis. “He told me that he hated parties; that he scarcely went anywhere.”

“Ah, but he did, though; and it has been his flirting way—not the things he has said, you know, but his way or saying them—his ompressmong, you know, that has caused those ill-natured remarks about Mrs. Tredethlyn. Nothing sets people talking like ompressmong.”

Francis did not answer. Little by little the mists cleared away from his mental vision; and he saw that Harcourt Lowther had been from first to last the subtlest schemer who ever plotted the ruin of an honest blockhead. It had needed only Miss Grunderson’s feminine guesswork to let sudden light into the cavernous depths of the foulest pitfall that ever treachery dug under the ignorant footsteps of its victim. Francis remembered all the bitter ridicule, the sneering compassion, that Harcourt Lowther had heaped upon the respectable world, from which he held his dupe aloof, while he plunged him to the very lips in the dissipations of Bohemia. By this means he had effected as complete a separation between the husband and wife as if the same roof had ceased to shelter them.

“I have thought—when my tempter gave me time to think—that it was Maude’s coldness alone which separated us; but I know now that it was the schemer’s work from first to last. She did not love me,—O Heaven, have pity upon my poor tortured heart!—she loved him, perhaps: but I might have had some little chance of winning her love if I had remained at her feet—her slave, her worshipper; but he has held me away from her, and now she abhors me. She has no feeling but disgust and disdain for the wretch who has abandoned her to waste his days on a racecourse, his nights in the drunken orgies of a gaming-house.”

Francis Tredethlyn sat with his face hidden in his hands, thinking of his folly, and hating himself for it. Why had he given himself up body and soul into the power of Harcourt Lowther? why had he been so poor a dupe in the toils of this man? It was not that he had entertained any special regard for the gentleman who had pretended to be his friend. In Van Diemen’s Land he had often had good reason to despise the peevish grumbler, the selfish Sybarite; and yet for the last year he had taken the man’s dictum upon every subject, even upon that one vital question on which the happiness of his life depended. Why had he trusted so blindly; why had he submitted so slavishly to follow the guiding-strings that led him into places where he found no pleasure, amongst people who inspired him with disgust?

Little by little the answers to these questions shaped themselves in Francis Tredethlyn’s mind; and he saw that his uncle Oliver’s hoarded wealth had been at the root of all his misery. The wealth which had lifted him suddenly into a world that was strange to him; the wealth which had made him the mark for every schemer; the wealth which had won him the hand of the woman whose heart could never have been won by his true and honest love. Adrift in that strange world, the man who had kept his name unsullied, his soul untainted, his head erect before the faces of his fellow-men, while his pockets were empty, and his very existence dependent upon the day’s work that earned him a day’s food, found himself all at once the most helpless creature that had ever floated at the mercy of the winds and waves upon a trackless ocean; and he had been very glad to grasp the first rope that was thrown out to him in all friendly seeming to guide him safely to the shore. His ignorance had flung him, unarmed and powerless, into Harcourt Lowther’s arms; and the man to whom he had felt himself superior while blacking his boots and obeying his orders out in Van Diemen’s Land became all at once, indeed, the master, free to work his own will with that most helpless of all creatures, an uneducated millionaire.

“If I had a son,” thought Francis Tredethlyn,—and a faint thrill was stirred in his breast by the mere hypothesis,—“I should send him to school before I turned him out into the world. Yet I, who am as ignorant as a baby of the world in which I live, have plunged recklessly into its vortex, expecting to emerge unhurt. My own folly is the cause of my destruction. And yet I might have met with an honest friend; I might have had a loving wife.”

“A loving wife!” Ah, how the poor faithful heart ached as Francis thought this! A man’s fireside is the same peaceful sanctuary, whether the hearth is gorgeous with encaustic tiles and an Axminster rug, or poorly covered with a scrap of faded Kidderminster, in some humble chamber where the firelight glimmers on the delf platters that adorn a cottage-dresser.

“If Maude had loved me,” Francis argued, brooding moodily upon his wrongs, “my money need have brought me no misery; my ignorance would have beguiled me into no danger. Her voice would have regulated my life; her counsel would have prompted every action. Her smallest wish would have been my law. And it would have been very hard if the companionship of a lady had not in time transformed me into a gentleman. But what are the people with whom I have herded since my marriage—the acquaintances whom Harcourt Lowther has chosen for me? What! pshaw! why do I stop to think of all this? She never loved me. I should have tried to win her love if he had left me to do so. I might have failed even then as miserably as I have failed now.”

He groaned aloud as he thought this, and startled Miss Grunderson, who was sitting at a respectful distance from him folding and unfolding her parasol, and wondering why she had got into this galère, and how she was to get out of it; and registering a mental vow that she would never again be tempted by her recollection of her duty to her neighbour to depart from the manners and customs of polite society. But to her relief Francis looked up presently, and addressed her.

“I thank you heartily for having spoken so frankly to me,” he said; “it is only right that I should be acquainted with the common talk about the man whose hand I have clasped in friendship almost every day for the last twelve months. But I hope you will believe that, whatever Mr. Lowther may or may not be, my wife is good and pure, and worthy of the warmest affection you can feel for her. Your warmth of feeling has touched me deeply, Miss Grunderson. I have been living in so false an atmosphere lately, that I must be dull indeed if I were not affected by your friendly candour. If—if anything should happen to separate Maude and me, I should be very glad to think she had such a friend as you. And—if ever you saw her trusting, as I have trusted, in the truth and honour of Harcourt Lowther, you would stand between her and that dangerous adviser, that false friend—would you not, Miss Grunderson?”

“I would,” answered Rosa, valiantly; “I should speak my mind to her and to Mr. Lowther into the bargain, as candidly as I have spoken it to you to-night.”

“I believe you would,” said Francis. “And now, my dear, God bless you, and good night!”

He held out both his hands and clasped Rosa’s pudgy little paws in a brief grasp, and then strode past her on his way towards the door.

“You’re not going out to-night, are you, Mr. Tredethlyn?” she asked anxiously; “it is so very late.”

Poor little Rosa was rather alarmed by that resolute stride towards the door, which might only be the first step in some ghastly vengeance to be taken upon Harcourt Lowther by the stalwart Cornishman.

“I shouldn’t like to have his blood upon my head, though I do hate and detest him,” thought Miss Grunderson; “for in these days of spirit-rapping there’s no knowing how he might spite himself upon me. I might have him tilting and tip-toeing every table I ever sat down to.”

“I’m only going to my room to write a letter,” answered Mr. Tredethlyn; “shall I order my wife’s carriage for you?”

“No, thank you; as our house is so near, I think I’ll ask one of your servants to see me home,” replied Rosa, who had no idea of leaving the ground just yet. “I’ll run up to Mrs. Tredethlyn’s room and say good-bye. Shall I take her any message from you?”

“None, thank you; good night.”

“Good night.”

Rosa left him still standing in the drawing-room. The spacious and grandiose apartment, in all of whose costly adornment—from the pictures on the walls to the Louis-Seize snuff-boxes and lapis-lazuli bonbonnières, and all the expensive frivolities so lavishly scattered on the tables—there was no single object which had been chosen with any reference to his taste, with any thought of his comfort or pleasure. No exquisite toys of “picking-up;” no delicious bargaining with dirty brokers in the purlieus of Holborn; no evening excursions, treasure-hunting, among dingy by-ways, where remnants of choice old china lurk sometimes, unrecognized and unvalued, amongst the rubbish in a dimly-lighted shop-window; none of the pleasant struggles, the proud triumphs, which attend the collection of Poverty’s art and virtu, had attended the decoration of this splendid chamber. The Cornishman had given carte blanche to his friend, and had written cheques—whose figures he had not remembered five minutes after writing them—in favour of a celebrated dealer in Bond Street, and an upholsterer in Oxford Street; and that was all. He smiled bitterly now as he paused to look round the room before he left it—perhaps for ever.

“And this has been my home,” he thought. “Home! Better to sit by my uncle Oliver’s miserly fire, in the dreary house on the Cornish moors, than to loll in one of those yellow-satin chairs, playing at ball with a gold snuff-box, and watching the traitor whom I have trusted talking to my wife.”