here to-day and saw her. And you may get the rooms ready, Mrs.
Eccles, and order anything that is wanted, and get in a couple of maids,
for I have made up my mind to bring my horses down next month."

CHAPTER III.

FANNING DEAD ASHES.

Weep no more, nor sigh, nor groan,
Sorrow calls no time that's gone,
Violets plucked, the sweetest rain
Makes not fresh, nor grow again.

Fletcher.

"Have you heard of Sir John's latest vagary, grandpapa? He is gone down
to Kynaston to hunt--so there's an end of _him_."

"Humph! Where did you hear that?"

"I've been lunching at Lady Kynaston's."

The speaker stood by the window of one of the large houses at Prince's
Gate overlooking the Horticultural Gardens. She was a small, slight
woman, with fair pale features and a mass of soft yellow hair. She had a
delicate complexion and very clear blue eyes. Altogether she was a pretty
little woman. A stranger would have guessed her to be a girl barely out
of her teens. Helen Romer was in reality five-and-twenty, and she had
been a widow four years.

Of her brief married life few people could speak with any certainty,
although there were plenty of surmises and conjectures concerning it. All
that was known was that Helen had lived with her grandfather till she was
nineteen; that one fine morning she had walked out of the house and had
been married to a man whom her grandfather disapproved of, and to whom
she had always professed perfect indifference. It was also known that
eighteen months later her husband, having rapidly wasted his existence by
drink and other irregular courses, had died in miserable poverty; and
that Helen, not being able to set up a home of her own, upon her slender
fortune of some five or six thousand pounds, had returned to her
grandfather's house in Prince's Gate, where she had lived ever since.

Why she had married William Romer no one ever exactly knew--perhaps Helen
herself least of any one. It certainly was not for love; it could hardly
have been from any worldly motive. Some people averred, and possibly they
were not far wrong, that she had done so out of pique because the man she
loved did not want her.

However that might be, Mrs. Romer returned a widow, and not a very
disconsolate one, to her grandfather's house.

It is certain that she would not have lived there could she have helped
it. She did not love old Mr. Harlowe, neither did Mr. Harlowe love her. A
sense of absolute duty to