nds are dead,' said Lady Maulevrier, 'but there are a
few survivors of the past who might help me.'

'I don't think there'll be any difficulty or doubt about the peerage.
Smithson stumped up very handsomely at the last General Election, and
the Conservatives are not strong enough to be ungrateful. "These have,
no master."'

CHAPTER XXXII.

WAYS AND MEANS.

The three days that followed were among the happiest days of Mary
Haselden's young life. Lady Maulevrier had become strangely indulgent. A
softening influence of some kind had worked upon that haughty spirit,
and it seemed as if her whole nature was changed--or it might be, Mary
thought, that this softer side of her character had always been turned
to Lesbia, while to Mary herself it was altogether new. Lesbia had been
the peach on the sunny southern wall, ripening and reddening in a flood
of sunshine; Mary had been the stunted fruit growing in a north-east
corner, hidden among leaves, blown upon by cold winds green and hard and
sour for lack of the warm bright light. And now Mary felt the sunshine,
and grew glad and gay in those glowing beams.

'Dear grandmother, I believe you are beginning to love me,' she said,
bending over to arrange the invalid's pillows in the July morning, the
fresh mountain air blowing in upon old and young from the great open
window, like a caress.

'I am beginning to know you,' answered Lady Maulevrier, gently.

'I think it is the magic of love, Mary, that has sweetened and softened
your nature, and endeared you to me. I think you have grown ever so much
sweeter a girl since your engagement. Or it may be that you were the
same always, and it was I who was blind. Lesbia was all in all to me.
All in all--and now I am nothing to her,' she murmured, to herself
rather than to Mary.

'I am so proud to think that you see an improvement in me since my
engagement,' said Mary, modestly. 'I have tried very hard to improve
myself, so that I might be more worthy of him.'

'You are worthy, Mary, worthy of the best and the highest: and I believe
that, although you are making what the world calls a very bad match, you
are marrying wisely. You are wedding yourself to a life of obscurity;
but what does that matter, if it be a happy life? I have known what it
is to pursue the phantom fortune, and to find youth and hope and
happiness vanish from the pathway which I followed.'

'Dear grandmother, I wish you had been able to marry the man of y