her
money? The question perturbed her with a sense of responsibility which
would have had no meaning for her in earlier years. How could she best
use the vast opportunity for good which lay to her hand?

Endless were the projects she formed, rejected, took up again. Vast was
the correspondence she held with all manner of representative people,
seeking for information, accumulating reports, lectures, argumentative
pamphlets, theoretic volumes, in mass altogether beyond her ability to
cope with; nowadays, her secretary read and digested and summarised
with tireless energy. Lady Ogram had never cared much for reading; she
admired Constance's quick intelligence and power of grappling with
printed matter. But that she had little faith in the future of her own
sex, she would have been tempted to say: "There is the coming woman."
Miss Bride's companionship was soon indispensable to her; she had begun
to dread the thought of being left alone with her multiplying
solicitudes and uncertainties.

Her great resource in these days was her savage hatred of Mr. Robb and
his family, and of all in any way adhering to him. Whenever she fixed
her mind on that, all wider troubles fled into space, and she was the
natural woman of her prime once more. Since making the acquaintance of
Dyce Lashmar, she had thought of little but this invigorating theme. At
last she had found the man to stand against Robb the Grinder, the man
of hope, a political and moral enthusiast who might sweep away the mass
of rotten privilege and precedent encumbering the borough of
Hollingford. She wrote to all her friends, at Hollingford and
throughout the country, making known that the ideal candidate in the
Liberal cause had at last been discovered. And presently she sent out
invitations to a dinner, on a day a fortnight ahead, which should
assemble some dozen of her faithful, to meet and hear the eloquent
young philosopher.

Excitement was not good for Lady Ogram's health; the doctors agreed in
prescribing tranquillity, and she had so far taken their advice as to
live of late in comparative retirement. Her observant companion noticed
that the conversations with Lashmar had been followed by signs of great
fatigue; an agitated manner, a temper even more uncertain than usual,
and physical symptoms which Constance had learnt to look for, proved
during the ensuing days that the invalid was threatened with another
crisis. Acting on her own responsibility, Constance add