om its old place, and is to be
found somewhere in a cupboard, as I suspect--but the likeness is
indubitably there, all undesigned. You see it in the firm lips and jaw,
in the straight brows on the pale face, above all in the hazel eyes, so
bright and yet profound. Eleanor Lacey had little luck after her
luckless flirtation. Fortune has been kinder to Jenny. She has a full
life, a good life, a very useful one. The story has grown old; the name
of Octon is merged; time has obliterated well-nigh all the tracks she
made in her evening flight from Hatcham Ford.

Yet not in her heart; there is no obliteration there, but rather an
indelible stamp; it may be covered up--it cannot be sponged or scratched
out. For her, Leonard is not forgotten; he triumphs. He lives again in
the son of Margaret his daughter; in the person of that son--his
grandson--he is to reign where he was spurned. That is the triumph of
the scheme she made--and to her it is Leonard's triumph. In her eyes her
own triumphs are little beside that.

"My day is done," she said to me once. "Bad it was, I suppose, and God
knows that it was short! But it was my day, and it is over." But she did
not speak in sorrow. "I am content--and at peace." She broke into a
smile. "Don't think of me as a woman any more. Think of me as just a man
of business!"

A man of business she is--and a very fine one; tactful and conciliatory,
daring and subtle. But not a woman? Never was there more a woman since
the world began--never one who leaned more on her woman's power, nor
turned the arts of woman more to practical account. She has had many
wooers; Dormer returned to the charge three or four times, till at last
he fell back--in a mood little above resignation--on Eunice Aspenick; we
have had an ambitious young merchant from Catsford, a curate or two, and
one splendid aspirant, a former brother-officer of Lacey's, a man of
great name and station. All went away with the same answer--but all were
sent away friends, praisers of Jenny, convinced, I think, that they had
only just failed and that no other man could have come so near success.
There lies her instinct, and she cannot help using it--sometimes for her
purposes, sometimes for her instinctive pleasure, which is still to lose
no adherent, and to make friends even in refusing to be more. She will
not marry, but she is marriageable--eminently marriageable--and that is
as much an asset now as when she threatened to use it against Lo