arts upon him which
she occasionally practised, and which his experience would immediately
have detected. Her disgust he had attributed to disinterestedness; and as
Kate had fixed her eye on a young officer lately returned from France, and
her mother on a Duke who was mourning the death of a third wife, devising
means to console him with a fourth--the Viscount had got a good deal
enamored with the lady, before either she or her mother took any
particular notice that there was such a being in existence. His title was
not the most elevated, but it was ancient. His paternal acres were not
numerous, but his East-India shares were. He was not very young, but he
was not very old; and as the Duke died of a fit of the gout in his
stomach, and the officer ran away with a girl in her teens from a
boarding-school, the dowager and her daughter, after thoroughly scanning
the fashionable world, determined, for want of a better, that _he_ would
do.

It is not to be supposed that the mother and child held any open
communications with each other to this effect. The delicacy and pride of
both would have been greatly injured by such a suspicion; yet they arrived
simultaneously at the same conclusion, as well as at another of equal
importance to the completion of their schemes on the Viscount. It was
simply to adhere to the same conduct which had made him a captive, as most
likely to insure the victory.

There was such a general understanding between the two it can excite no
surprise that they co-operated harmoniously as it were by signal.

For two people, correctly impressed with their duties and
responsibilities, to arrive at the same conclusion in the government of
their conduct, would be merely a matter of course; and so with those who
are more or less under the dominion of the world. They will pursue their
plans with a degree of concurrence amounting nearly to sympathy; and thus
had Kate and her mother, until this morning, kept up the masquerade so
well that the Viscount was as confiding as a country Corydon. When he
first witnessed the dowager's management with Grace and John, however, and
his wife's careless disregard of a thing which appeared too much a matter
of course to be quite agreeable, his newly awakened distrust approached
conviction.

Grace Chatterton both sang and played exquisitely; it was, however, seldom
she could sufficiently overcome her desire, when John was an auditor, to
appear to advantage.

As the party we