on that could do no one any harm. I
never asked you to commit yourself in any way. Well, well, it is what
I must expect. We have not seen much of each other heretofore, and
perhaps the less we meet in the future the better."

"You have no right to talk to me so," she answered, with flashing
eyes, "though I am your daughter, and it is cowardly to reproach me
with my birth, my sex, and my dependence. Am I responsible for any of
these things? But I will not burden you long. And as to what you
wanted me to do, and think such a little of, I ask you, is it what my
poor mother would have wished her daughter----"

Here Philip abruptly rose, and left the room and the house.

"She is as like her mother as possible," he mused, as soon as he was
clear of the house. "It might have been Hilda herself, only she is
twice as beautiful as Hilda was. I shall have another bad night after
this, I know I shall. I must get rid of that girl somehow, I cannot
bear her about me; she is a daily reminder of things I dare not
remember, and whenever she stares at me with those great eyes of hers,
I feel as though she were looking through me. I wonder if she knows
the story of Maria Lee!"

And then dismissing, or trying to dismiss, the matter from his mind,
he took his way across the fields to Isleworth Hall, a large white
brick mansion in the Queen Anne style, about two miles distant from
the Abbey, and, on arrival, asked for his cousin George, and was at
once shown into that gentleman's presence.

Years had told upon George more than they had upon Philip, and, though
there were no touches of grey in the flaming red of his hair, the
bloodshot eyes, and the puckered crowsfeet beneath them, to say
nothing of the slight but constant trembling of the hand, all showed
that he was a man well on in middle-life, and who had lived every day
of it. Time, too, had made the face more intensely unpleasant and
vulgar-looking than ever. Such Caresfoot characteristics as it
possessed were, year by year, giving place, in an increasingly greater
degree, to the kitchen-maid strain introduced by the mother. In short,
George Caresfoot did not even look a gentleman, whereas Philip
certainly did.

"You don't seem very well, George. I am afraid that your travels have
not agreed with you."

"My dear Philip," answered his cousin, in a languid and affected
voice, "if you had lived the life that I have for the last twenty
years, you would look a little knocked up. I h