disgraced her, lowered her pride to the dust, degraded the name she
bore. She had married him, not loving him--nay, plucking another love
out of her heart in order that she might give herself to him. She had
married him for position and fortune; and now by his follies, by his
extravagance, and by that greed of gold which is inevitable in the
spendthrift and profligate, he had gone near to cheat her out of both
name and fortune. Yet she so commanded herself as to receive him with a
friendly air when he arrived at the Dolphin, on a dull grey autumn
afternoon, after she had waited for him nearly a fortnight.

James Steadman ushered in his lordship, a frail attenuated looking
figure, of middle height, wrapped in a furred cloak, yet shivering, a
pale sickly face, light auburn whiskers, light blue eyes, full and
large, but with no intellectual power in them. Lady Maulevrier was
sitting by the fire, in a melancholy attitude, with the Blenheim spaniel
on her lap. Her son was at Hastings with his nurses. She had nothing
nearer and dearer than the spaniel.

She rose and went over to her husband, and let him kiss her. It would
have been too much to say that she kissed him; but she submitted her
lips unresistingly to his, and then they sat down on opposite sides of
the hearth.

'A wretched afternoon,' said his lordship, shivering, and drawing his
chair closer to the fire. Steadman had taken away his fur-lined cloak.
'I had really underrated the disagreeableness of the English climate. It
is abominable!'

'To-day is not a fair sample,' answered her ladyship, trying to be
cheerful; 'we have had some pleasant autumn days.'

'I detest autumn!' exclaimed Lord Maulevrier. 'a season of dead leaves,
damp, and dreariness. I should like to get away to Montpellier or Nice
as soon as we can.'

Her ladyship gave him a scathing look, half-scornful, half-incredulous.

'You surely would not dream of leaving the country,' she said, 'under
present circumstances. So long as you are here to answer all charges no
one will interfere with your liberty; but if you were to cross the
Channel--'

'My slanderers might insinuate that I was running away,' interrupted
Maulevrier, 'although the very fact of my return ought to prove to every
one that I am able to meet and face this cabal.'

'Is it a cabal?' asked her ladyship, looking at him with a gaze that
searched his soul. 'Can you meet their charges? Can you live down this
hideous accusation, and