amazement.

"Whose hearts?" said the painter.

"Lord and Lady Dunstable's."

"You know them?" exclaimed Doris.

"I used to know them--quite well," said the girl, quietly. "My father
had one of Lord Dunstable's livings. He died last year. He didn't like
Lady Dunstable. He quarrelled with her, because--because she once did a
very rude thing to me. But this would be _too_ awful! And poor Lord
Dunstable! Everybody likes him. Oh--it must be stopped!--it _must_!"

CHAPTER IV

When Doris reached home that evening, the little Kensington house, with
half its carpets up and all but two of its rooms under dust-sheets,
looked particularly lonely and unattractive. Arthur's study was
unrecognisable. No cheerful litter anywhere. No smell of tobacco, no
sign of a male presence! Doris, walking restlessly from room to room,
had never felt so forsaken, so dismally certain that the best of life
was done. Moreover, she had fully expected to find a letter from Arthur
waiting for her; and there was nothing.

It was positively comic that under such circumstances anybody should
expect her--Doris Meadows--to trouble her head about Lady Dunstable's
affairs. Of course she would feel it if her son made a ridiculous and
degrading marriage. But why not?--why shouldn't he come to grief like
anybody else's son? Why should heaven and earth be moved in order to
prevent it?--especially by the woman to whose possible jealousy and pain
Lady Dunstable had certainly never given the most passing thought.

All the same, the distress shown by that odd girl, Miss Wigram, and her
appeal both to the painter and his niece to intervene and save the
foolish youth, kept echoing in Doris's memory, although neither she nor
Bentley had received it with any cordiality. Doris had soon made out
that this girl, Alice Wigram, was indeed the clergyman's daughter whom
Lady Dunstable had snubbed so unkindly some twelve months before. She
was evidently a sweet-natured, susceptible creature, to whom Lord
Dunstable had taken a fancy, in his fatherly way, during occasional
visits to her father's rectory, and of whom he had spoken to his wife.
That Lady Dunstable should have unkindly slighted this motherless girl,
who had evidently plenty of natural capacity under her shyness, was just
like her, and Doris's feelings of antagonism to the tyrant were only
sharpened by her acquaintance with the victim. Why should Miss Wigram
worry her self? Lord Dunstable? Well, but aft