f a wife."

"I will never receive Harriet Hunsden!" Lady Kingsland passionately
cried.

"Perhaps you will never have the opportunity. She may prefer to become
mistress of Strathmore Castle. Lord Ernest is her most devoted adorer.
I have not asked her yet. The chances are a thousand to one she will
refuse when I do."

His mother laughed scornfully, but her eyes were ablaze.

"You mean to ask her, then?"

"Most assuredly."

She laughed again--a bitter, mirthless laugh.

"We go fast, my friend! And you have hardly known this divinity
four-and-twenty hours."

"Love is not a plant of slow growth. Like Jonah's gourd, it springs
up, fully matured, in an hour."

"Does it? My son is better versed in amatory floriculture than I am.
But before you ask Miss Hunsden to become Lady Kingsland, had you not
better inquire who her mother was?"

The baronet thought of the letter, and turned very pale.

"Her mother? I do not understand. What of her mother?"

"Only this"--Lady Kingsland arose as she spoke, her face deathly white,
her pale eyes glittering--"the mother is a myth and a mystery. Report
says Captain Hunsden was married in America--no one knows where--and
America is a wide place. No one ever saw the wife; no one ever heard
Miss Hunsden speak of her mother; no one ever heard of that mother's
death. I leave Sir Everard Kingsland to draw his own inferences."

She swept from the room with a mighty rustle of silk. A dark figure
crouching on the rug, with its ear to the keyhole, barely had time to
whisk behind a tall Indian cabinet as the door opened.

It was Miss Sybilla Silver, who was already asserting her prerogative
as amateur lady's-maid.

My lady shut herself up in her own room for the remainder of the
evening, too angry and mortified for words to tell. It was the first
quarrel she and her idolized son ever had, and the disappointment of
all her ambitious hopes left her miserable enough.

But scarcely so miserable as Sir Everard. To be hopelessly in love on
such short notice was bad enough; to have the dread of a rejection
hanging over him was worse; but to have this dark mystery looming
horribly in the horizon was worst of all.

His mother's insinuations alone would not have disturbed him; but those
insinuations, taken in unison with Captain Hunsden's mysterious illness
of the morning, drove him nearly wild.

"And I dare not even ask," he thought, "or set my doubts at rest. Any
inquiry fro