the famous beauty, Lady
Bridget-Mary Bawne? Well, that was the very person, who had been Abbess,
or Prioress, or something-else-ess of a Roman Catholic Sisterhood at
Gueldersdorp, and died of pneumonia during the Siege, or did she get shot?
That was it, poor dear thing, and how quite too horrid for her!

We may know that that belated letter of the Mother's--written to her
kinswoman when the first mutterings of the storm were yet dulled by
distance, and the threatening clouds were beginning to build their
blue-black bastions and frowning ramparts on the horizon--had got through
at last. The Bawnes, true to their hereditary quality of generous loyalty,
threw open their doors and their hearts to dead Bridget-Mary's darling;
and Saxham was undisguisedly grateful when he saw how she warmed to them.
But he gave no encouragement, verbal, written, or tacit to their desire to
fulfil the dead woman's wishes in the settlement of a sum of money upon
Lynette. He had made such provision for her himself as his means
permitted. His books had been selling steadily for the past six years, his
publishers had paid him a handsome sum in royalties, and a thousand
guineas for the copyright of a new work. Plas Bendigaid was secured to his
wife; and Saxham's life was heavily insured, and the bulk of the sum
remaining from the purchase of the furniture and fixtures of the house in
Harley Street, with the practice of the physician who was giving up
tenancy, had been invested in her name with the other funds. Why should
strangers interfere with his sole privilege of working for her?

"I should prefer that the decision should be left entirely to my wife," he
said, when the Head of the House of Bawne, with the pompous solemnity
distinctive of a young man who takes himself and his position seriously,
formally broached the subject.

"Lady Castleclare has--arah!--already approached Mrs. Saxham on the
question," said Lord Castleclare, tapping the shiny surface of the
leather-covered writing-table near which he sat with the long, thin,
ivory-hued fingers, ending in long, narrow, bluish-tinted nails, that had
descended to him--with the peculiar sniffing drawl that prolonged and
punctuated his verbal utterance--from his late father. "And I regret to
hear from Lady Castleclare that Mrs. Saxham gave no encouragement to the
suggestion. I confess myself disappointed equally with my wife and my
elder step-sister, the Duchess of Broads, to whom the letter was