e beginning, but that he was as before willing to
carry out the arrangements which he had already specified, provided
that Ida could be persuaded to consent to marry him. To this Mr. de la
Molle had answered courteously enough, notwithstanding his grief and
irritation at the course his would-be son-in-law had taken about the
mortgages on the death of Mr. Quest, and the suspicion (it was nothing
more) that he now had as to the original cause of their transfer to
the lawyer. He said what he had said before, that he could not force
his daughter into a marriage with him, but that if she chose to agree
to it he should offer no objection. And there the matter stood. Once
or twice Edward had met Ida walking or driving. She bowed to him
coldly and that was all. Indeed he had only one crumb of comfort in
his daily bread of disappointment, and the hope deferred which, where
a lady is concerned, makes the heart more than normally sick, and it
was that he knew his hated rival, Colonel Quaritch, had been forbidden
the Castle, and that intercourse between him and Ida was practically
at an end.

But he was a dogged and persevering man; he knew the power of money
and the shifts to which people can be driven who are made desperate by
the want of it. He knew, too, that it is no rare thing for women who
are attached to one man to sell themselves to another of their own
free will, realising that love may pass, but wealth (if the
settlements are properly drawn) does not. Therefore he still hoped
that with so many circumstances bringing an ever-increasing pressure
upon her, Ida's spirit would in time be broken, her resistance would
collapse, and he would have his will. Nor, as the sequel will show,
was that hope a baseless one.

As for his infatuation there was literally no limit to it. It broke
out in all sorts of ways, and for miles round was a matter of public
notoriety and gossip. Over the mantelpiece in his sitting-room was a
fresh example of it. By one means and another he had obtained several
photographs of Ida, notably one of her in a court dress which she had
worn two or three years before, when her brother James had insisted
upon her being presented. These photographs he caused to be enlarged
and then, at the cost of 500 pounds, commissioned a well-known artist
to paint from them a full-length life-size portrait of Ida in her
court dress. This order had been executed, and the portrait, which
although the colouring was not entirel