little
smile. The baby she had brought back was a puny, ugly, and tiny girl.
Hester's dry, little smile when she exhibited her to her relations was
not pretty.

"She saved herself disappointment by being a girl," she remarked. "At
all events, she knows from the outset that no one can rob her of the
chance of being the Marquis of Walderhurst."

It was rumoured that ugly things went on in the Osborn bungalow. It was
known that scenes occurred between the husband and wife which were not
of the order admitted as among the methods of polite society. One
evening Mrs. Osborn walked slowly down the Mall dressed in her best gown
and hat, and bearing on her cheek a broad, purpling mark. When asked
questions, she merely smiled and made no answer, which was extremely
awkward for the well-meaning inquirer.

The questioner was the wife of the colonel of the regiment, and when the
lady related the incident to her husband in the evening, he drew in his
breath sharply and summed the situation up in a few words.

"That little woman," he said, "lives every day through twenty-four hours
of hell. One can see it in her eyes, even when she professes to smile at
the brute for decency's sake. The awfulness of a woman's forced smile at
the devil she is tied to, loathing him and bearing in her soul the
thing, blood itself could not wipe out. Ugh! I've seen it once before,
and I recognised it in her again. There will be a bad end to this."

There probably would have been, with the aid of unlimited brandy and
unrestrained devil, some outbreak so gross that the social laws which
rule men who are "officers and gentlemen" could not have ignored or
overlooked it. But the end came in an unexpected way, and Osborn was
saved from open ignominy by an accident.

On a certain day when he had drunk heavily and had shut Hester up with
him for an hour's torture, after leaving her writhing and suffocating
with sobs, he went to examine some newly bought firearms. In twenty
minutes it was he who lay upon the floor writhing and suffocating, and
but a few minutes later he was a dead man. A charge from a gun he had
believed unloaded had finished him.

* * * * *

Lady Walderhurst was the kindest of women, as the world knew. She sent
for little Mrs. Osborn and her child, and was tender goodness itself to
them.

Hester had been in England four years, and Lord Oswyth had a brother as
robust as himself, when one heavenly summer a