tions, Robina's were of the very best. Lady Frances was her
second cousin. In the days when he was trying to find excuses for
marrying Robina, it was in considering her connections that he found
his finest. The Vicar had informed his conscience that he was
marrying Robina because of what she could do for his three motherless
daughters--and himself.

Preferment even lay (through the Gilbeys) within Robina's scope.

But to have planted Gwenda on Lady Frances Robina must have pulled all
the wires she knew. Lady Frances was a distinguished philanthropist
and a rigid Evangelical, so rigid and so distinguished that, in the
eyes of poor parsons waiting for preferment, she constituted a pillar
of the Church.

To the Vicar, as he brooded over it, Robina's act was more than mere
protection of his daughter Gwenda. Not only was it carrying the war
into the enemy's camp with a vengeance, it was an act of hostility
subtler and more malignant than overt defiance.

Ever since she left him, Robina had been trying to get hold of the
girls, regarding them as the finest instruments in her relentless
game. For it never occurred to Mr. Cartaret that his third wife's
movements could by any possibility refer to anybody but himself.
Robina, according to Mr. Cartaret, was perpetually thinking of him
and of how she could annoy him. She had shown a fiendish cleverness in
placing Gwenda with Lady Frances. She couldn't have done anything that
could have annoyed him more. More than anything that Robina had yet
done, it put him in the wrong. It put him in the wrong not only with
Lady Frances and the best people, but it put him in the wrong with
Gwenda and kept him there. Against Gwenda, with Lady Frances and a
salary of a hundred a year at her back, he hadn't the appearance of a
leg to stand on. The thing had the air of justifying Gwenda's behavior
by its consequences.

That was what Robina had been reckoning on. For, if it had been Gwenda
she had been thinking of, she would have kept her instead of
handing her over to Lady Frances. The companion secretaries of that
distinguished philanthropist had no sinecure even at a hundred a year.

As for Gwenda's accepting such a post, that proved nothing as against
his view of her. It only proved, what he had always known, that you
could never tell what Gwenda would do next.

And because nothing could be said with any dignity, the Vicar had said
nothing as he rose and went into his study.

It was ther