r it,
as she got over everything; but when several years afterwards his widow,
with whom, it is hardly necessary to say, she was not on speaking terms,
suddenly died (being a faint-hearted, feeble creature), Lady Deyncourt
immediately took possession of her grandchildren--a boy and two
girls--and proceeded as far as in her lay to ruin the boy for life.

"A woman," she was apt to remark in after years, "is not intended by
nature to manage any man except her husband. I am a warning to the
mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, particularly the grandmothers, of the
future. A husband is a sufficient field for the employment of a woman's
whole energies. I went beyond my sphere, and I am punished."

And when Raymond Deyncourt finally disappeared in America for the last
time, having been fished up therefrom on several occasions, each time in
worse case than the last, she excommunicated him, and cheerfully altered
her will, dividing the sixty thousand pounds she had it in her power to
leave, between her two granddaughters, and letting the fact become
known, with the result that Anna was married by the end of her second
season; and if at the end of five seasons Ruth was still unmarried, she
had, as Lady Deyncourt took care to inform people, no one to thank for
it but herself.

But in reality, now that Anna was provided for, Lady Deyncourt was in no
hurry to part with Ruth. She liked her as much as it was possible for
her to like any one--indeed, I think she even loved her in a way. She
had taken but small notice of her while she was in the school-room, for
she cared little about girls as a rule; but as she grew up tall, erect,
with the pale, stately beauty of a lily, Lady Deyncourt's heart went out
to her. None of her own daughters had been so distinguished-looking, so
ornamental. Ruth's clothes always looked well on her, and she had a
knack of entertaining people, and much taste in the arrangement of
flowers. Though she had inherited the Deyncourt earnestness of
character, together with their dark serious eyes, and a certain annoying
rigidity as to right and wrong, these defects were counterbalanced by
flashes of brightness and humor which reminded Lady Deyncourt of herself
in her own brilliant youth, and inclined her to be lenient, when in her
daughters' cases she would have been sarcastic. The old woman and the
young one had been great friends, and not the less so, perhaps, because
of a tacit understanding which existed between