d to think of them.

"My darling, I never knew--" "Why not?" she said swiftly. "Because you
never tried to know--never cared to know. But now that I can be a
credit to you again--the moment you hear that I have had a great
fortune left to me--now you come back."

"Do you mean to say," he demanded sternly, "that you think--you
honestly think I have come back to you on account of your money?"

She returned his cold, searching gaze in kind.

"Honestly," she said, "I do think so. There is no way out of it."

He rose deliberately, bowed to her, and picked up his hat. He was not
really mercenary--or, if he was, he did not know it--and he was as
intensely proud as she was. He felt that he had received the deadliest
insult ever dealt him in his life, and one that he could never forget
or forgive.

Without another word, he turned to the door and walked out. She stood
still and watched him go, a calm smile curving her lips, a very cyclone
of passion tearing through her heart; and she scorned to recall him.

CHAPTER XXI.

Deb yearned to have her Australian sisters--Frances was European--with
her at Redford, as in the old days; she hated to be luxuriating there
without them. But for a time the husbands stood in the way. She could
not bring herself to ask them too. The draper she hardly knew at
all--in her correspondence with Rose his name was rarely mentioned by
either, except in comprehensive messages at the end of letters; and
Bennet Goldsworthy's company, Deb said, simply made her ill.

It had made her ill since, after her father's death, the clergyman had
permitted himself, in her hearing, to vent his personal disappointment
at the unexpected smallness of his wife's inheritance. The man had
presumed to take the air of one reasonably aggrieved; he had even
dropped angry words about "deception" in the first heat of his chagrin.
"As if," said haughty Deb, "it was not enough for him to have married
one of us!" When he was understood to say that he had "arranged his
life" in accordance with the expectations he had been given the right
to entertain, Deb's withering comment was: "As if HIS life matters!"

But she was intolerant in her dislikes.

Poor Mr Goldsworthy, incurable cadger that he was, was bound to feel
the family reverses acutely. When he had married Miss Pennycuick for
her good, in that risky manner, he had naturally expected to be
rewarded for the deed. If ever it be safe to trust to appearances, it
h