e had no taste. I hope he is quite
well. I suppose you heard from him?"

"Yes. He is well, but evidently pines for home quarters and old
friends. Thinking you would like to see him after so long a separation,
I have invited him here. You--you don't object?"

"I?" says her ladyship, promptly, reddening, but laughing too very
successfully. "Now, why should I object? On the contrary, I shall be
charmed; he will be quite an acquisition. If I remember rightly,"--with
a little affected drooping of the lids,--"he is a very handsome man,
and, I hear, amusing."

Mr. Amherst, foiled in his amiable intention of drawing confusion on
the head of somebody, subsides into a grunt and his easy-chair. To have
gone to all this trouble for nothing, to have invited secretly this
man, who interests him not at all, in hopes of a little excitement, and
to have those hopes frustrated, disgusts him.

Yet, after all, there will, there must be some amusement in store for
him, in watching the meeting between this strange pair. He at least may
not prove as cool and indifferent as his pretty wife.

"He will be here to dinner to-day," he says, grumpishly, knowing that
all around him are inwardly rejoicing at his defeat.

This is a thunder-bolt, though he is too much disheartened by his first
defeat to notice it. Lady Stafford grows several shades paler,
and--luncheon being at an end--rises hurriedly. Going toward the door,
she glances back, and draws Molly by a look to her side.

"Come with me," she says; "I must speak to some one, and to you before
any of the others."

When they have reached Cecil's pretty sitting-room, off which her
bedroom opens, the first thing her ladyship does is to subside into a
seat and laugh a little.

"It is like a play," she says, "the idea of his coming down here, to
find _me_ before him. It will be a surprise; for I would swear
that horrible old man never told him of my being in the house, or he
would not have come. Am I talking Greek to you, Molly? You know my
story, surely?"

"I have heard something of it--not much--from Mr. Luttrell," says
Molly, truthfully.

"It is a curious one, is it not? and one not easily matched. It all
came of that horrible will. Could there be anything more stupid than
for an old man to depart this life and leave behind him a document
binding two young people in such a way as makes it 'do or die' with
them? I had never seen my cousin in all my life, and he had never seen
me; yet