andfather, and receipts
for moneys deposited in the great banks of Amsterdam and Vienna. Master
Skyffington had charge of all those papers now: they represented nearly
five hundred thousand pounds of money and she told her husband that they
would all be placed in her own keeping, the day she was of age.

He appeared to lend an inattentive ear to all these explanations, which
she gave in those timid tones, which had lately become habitual to her,
but once--when she made a slip, and talked about a share which she
possessed in the Russian Company being worth L50,000, he corrected her
and said it was a good deal more, and gave her some explanations as to
the real distribution of her capital, which astonished her by their
lucidity and left her vaguely wondering how it happened that he knew.
She had finally to promise to come to him at the cottage in Acol on the
2d of November--her twenty-first birthday--directly after her interview
with the lawyer and with her guardian, and having obtained possession of
all the share papers, the obligations, the grants of monopolies and the
receipts from the Amsterdam and Vienna banks, to forthwith bring them
over to the cottage and place them unreservedly in her husband's hands.

And she would in her simplicity and ignorance gladly have given every
scrap of paper--now in Master Skyffington's charge--in exchange for a
return of those happy illusions which had surrounded the early history
of her love with a halo of romance. She would have given this mysterious
prince, now her husband, all the money that he wanted for this wonderful
"great work" of his, if he would but give her back some of that
enthusiastic belief in him which had so mysteriously been killed within
her, that fateful moment in the vestry at Dover.

CHAPTER XXIV

NOVEMBER THE 2D

A dreary day, with a leaden sky overhead and the monotonous patter of
incessant rain against the window panes.

Sir Marmaduke de Chavasse had just come downstairs, and opening the door
which lead from the hall to the small withdrawing-room on the right, he
saw Mistress de Chavasse, half-sitting, half-crouching in one of the
stiff-backed chairs, which she had drawn close to the fire.

There was a cheerful blaze on the hearth, and the room itself--being
small--always looked cozier than any other at Acol Court.

Nevertheless, Editha's face was pallid and drawn, and she stared into
the fire with eyes which seemed aglow with anxiety and even