terrible thing to remain unvisited by the "County." What a good thing
it would be, she reflected, if Mr. Brand could marry some nice girl, who
would persuade him to send his mother back to France, and for whose sake
the County magnates would extend to him the right hand of fellowship. To
reinstate him in his proper position--the position which Margaret told
herself he deserved and would adorn--seemed to her an ambition worthy of
any woman in the world. For Margaret's nature was curiously mixed. From
her father she had inherited a great love of the beautiful and the
romantic--there was a thoroughly unworldly strain in him which had
descended to her; but, then, it was counteracted by the influences which
she had imbibed from Lady Caroline. Margaret used sometimes to rebel
against her mother's maxims of worldly wisdom, but they gradually
permeated her mind, and the gold was so mingled with alloy that it was
difficult to separate one from the other. She thought herself a very
unworldly person. We all have ideals of ourselves; and Margaret's ideal
of herself was of a rather saint-like creature, with high aspirations
and pure motives. Where her weakness really lay she had not the faintest
notion.

It was strange even to herself to note the impression that Wyvis Brand
had produced on her. He was certainly of the type that tends to attract
impressionable girls, for he was dark and handsome, with the indefinable
touch of melancholy in his eyes which lends a subtler interest to the
face than mere beauty. The little that she knew of his history had
touched her. She constructed a great deal from the few facts or fancies
that had been given to her, and the result was sufficiently unlike the
real man to be recognizable by nobody but Margaret herself.

It has already been said that the Adair property and that of Wyvis Brand
lay side by side. The Adair estate was a large one: that of the Brands'
comparatively small; but at one point the two properties were separated
for some little distance only by a narrow fishing stream, on one side
of which stretched an outlying portion of Mr. Adair's park; while on the
other side lay a plantation, approached through the Beaminster woods,
and not very far from the Red House itself. It was in this
plantation--which was divided from the woods only by a wire fence--that
Janetta had found little Julian and had afterwards encountered Wyvis
Brand.

In spring the plantation was a particularly pleasant pl