r money in this
connection."

Mr. Marable could ill brook contradiction or dissent. He quivered with
more than the infirmities of age as he stood by the table, supporting
himself on his cane.

"You don't reflect, Mr. Bayne, that though she gets the child's estate if
he dies or continues lost--if he lives and this expenditure goes on, she
will be penniless--you don't realize that. She will be a poor woman--she
will have nothing left of her provision as a widow."

"Well, that suits me to the ground," Bayne retorted unexpectedly. "I
shall be glad to profit as little as possible by Mr. Royston's property."

The notary public, come to take Mrs. Royston's acknowledgment, was
announced at the moment, and the two gentlemen, still wrangling, went
into the reception room to meet him. Mrs. Marable, her eternal Battenberg
in her hands, looked up through the meshes of a perplexity, as visible as
if it were a veritable network, at Gladys, who was standing in the recess
of the bay-window, a book in her hand.

"I didn't understand that remark of Mr. Bayne's as to the poverty of Mr.
Royston's widow," the old lady submitted.

Gladys, the match-maker, laughed delightedly. "_I did!_" she cried
triumphantly.

As she went out of the room, she encountered Lillian in the hall,
summoned to sign and acknowledge the papers. The flush on the cheek of
Gladys, the triumph in her eyes, the laugh in the curves of her beautiful
lips, arrested Mrs. Royston's attention. "What are you laughing about?"
she asked, in a sort of plaintive wonderment.

"About something that Julian said just now."

"What was it?" Lillian queried, still bewildered in a sort.

The flush deepened on Mrs. Briscoe's cheek, her eyes were full of light,
her voice chimed with a sort of secret joy.

"I will not tell you!" she cried, and, still smiling, she floated down
the hall, her book in her hand.

Lillian stood motionless in amaze. Something that Julian Bayne had said
to work this metamorphosis! Something that she must not hear, must not
know! The look in her friend's eyes, the tone of her voice, stayed with
Lillian in every moment of surcease of torment for the child's rescue,
and worked their own mission of distress. Had she thought indeed that she
could hold Julian Bayne's heart through all vicissitudes of weal and woe,
of time and change? She had of her own free choice thrown it away once as
a thing of no worth. She had never justified her course, or thought it
co