Lord Carwitchet can come and escort her to Paris to visit some
American friends. Goodness knows when that will be! Do go up to town,
Uncle Paul!"

I refused indignantly. The very least I could do was to stand by my poor
young relatives in their troubles and help them through. I did so. I wore
that inferior cat's eye for six weeks!

It is a time I cannot think of even now without a shudder. The more I saw
of that terrible old woman the more I detested her, and we saw a very
great deal of her. Leta kept her word, and neither accepted nor gave
invitations all that time. We were cut off from all society but that of
old General Fairford, who would go anywhere and meet anyone to get a
rubber after dinner; the doctor, a sporting widower; and the Duberlys, a
giddy, rather rackety young, couple who had taken the Dower House for a
year. Lady Carwitchet seemed perfectly content. She reveled in the soft
living and good fare of the Manor House, the drives in Leta's big
barouche, and Domenico's dinners, as one to whom short commons were not
unknown. She had a hungry way of grabbing and grasping at everything she
could--the shillings she won at whist, the best fruit at dessert, the
postage stamps in the library inkstand--that was infinitely suggestive.
Sometimes I could have pitied her, she was so greedy, so spiteful, so
friendless. She always made me think of some wicked old pirate putting
into a peaceful port to provision and repair his battered old hulk,
obliged to live on friendly terms with the natives, but his piratical old
nostrils asniff for plunder and his piratical old soul longing to be off
marauding once more. When would that be? Not till the arrival in Paris of
her distinguished American friends, of whom we heard a great deal.
"Charming people, the Bokums of Chicago, the American branch of the
English Beauchamps, you know!" They seemed to be taking an unconscionable
time to get there. She would have insisted on being driven over to
Northchurch to call at the palace, but that the bishop was understood to
be holding confirmations at the other end of the diocese.

I was alone in the house one afternoon sitting by my window, toying with
the key of my safe, and wondering whether I dare treat myself to a peep at
my treasures, when a suspicious movement in the park below caught my
attention. A black figure certainly dodged from behind one tree to the
next, and then into the shadow of the park paling instead of keeping to
the