that her schemes were in
a fair way for success. She was not going to let Maurice know of them too
soon; by-and-by, when all was settled, she would tell him; she would keep
it till then as a pleasant surprise.

All the same, she had been unable to refrain from telling Helen Romer
something of what was in her mind.

"If John does not marry, he might perhaps make Maurice his agent and let
him live at Kynaston," she had said to her a few days ago when they had
been speaking of old Mr. Harlowe's illness.

"How would Maurice like to leave the army?" Helen had asked.

"If he marries, he must do so," his mother had replied, significantly;
and Helen's heart had beat high with hope and triumph.

Again to-day, on her way to her eldest son's rooms, she had stopped at
Princes Gate and had alluded to it.

"I am on my way to see Sir John; I shall sound him about his intentions
with regard to Kynaston, but, of course, I must go to work cautiously;"
and Helen had perfectly understood that she herself had entered into the
old lady's scheme for her younger son's future.

Sitting alone in the hushed house, where the doctors are coming and
going in the darkened room above, Helen feels that at last the reward
of all her long waiting may be at hand. Love and wealth at last seemed
to beckon to her. Her grandfather dead; his fortune hers; and this offer
of a home at Kynaston, which Maurice himself would be sure to like so
much--everything good seemed coming to her at last.

And there was something about the idea of living at Kynaston that
gratified her particularly. Helen had not forgotten the week at
Shadonake. Too surely had her woman's instinct told her that Maurice and
Vera had been drawn to each other by a strong and mutual attraction. The
wildest jealousy and hatred against Vera burnt fiercely in her lawless,
untutored heart. She hated her, for she knew that Maurice loved her. To
live thus under her very eyes as Maurice's wife, in the very house her
rival herself had once been on the point of inhabiting, was a notion that
commended itself to her with all the sweetness of gratified revenge, with
all the charm of flaunting her success and triumph in the face of the
other woman's failure which is dear to such a nature as Helen's.

She alone, of all those who had heard of Vera's broken engagement, had
divined its true cause. She loved Maurice--that was plain to Helen; that
was why she had thrown over Sir John, and at her heart Helen