' he said; 'I am working
hard at a picture in the country, but business just now calls me to
London for a short time.'

With this we parted at the door of the restaurant.

II

It was through the merest accident that I saw these two men again.

One evening I had been dining with my mother and aunt. I think I may
say that I had now become entirely reconciled to my mother. I used to
call upon her often, and at every call I could not but observe how
dire was the struggle going on within her breast between pride and
remorse. She felt, and rightly felt, that the loss of Winifred among
the Welsh hills had been due to her harshness in sending the stricken
girl away from Raxton, to say nothing of her breaking her word with
me after having promised to take my place and watch for the exposure
of the cross by the wash of the tides until the danger was certainly
past.

But against my aunt I cherished a stronger resentment every day. She
it was, with her inferior intellect and insect soul, who had in my
childhood prejudiced my mother against me and in favour of Frank,
because I showed signs of my descent from Fenella Stanley while Frank
did not. She it was who first planted in my mother's mind the seeds
of prejudice against Winnie as being the daughter of Tom Wynne.

The influence of such a paltry nature upon a woman of my mother's
strength and endowments had always astonished as much as it had
irritated me.

I had not learnt then what I fully learnt afterwards, that in this
life it is mostly the dull and stupid people who dominate the clever
ones--that it is, in short, the fools who govern the world.

I should, of course, never have gone to Belgrave Square at all had it
not been to see my mother. Such a commonplace slave of convention was
my aunt, that, on the evening I am now mentioning, she had scarcely
spoken to me during dinner, because, having been detained at the
solicitor's, I had found it quite impossible to go to my hotel to
dress for her ridiculous seven o'clock dinner.

When I found that my mother had actually taken this inferior woman
into her confidence in regard to my affairs and told her all about
Winnie and the cross, my dislike of her became intensified, and on
this evening my mother very much vexed me in the drawing-room by
taking the cross from a cabinet and saying to me,

'What is now to be done with this? All along the coast there are such
notions about its value that to replace it in the tomb wou