other
place, or just give her a good round sum--as he could afford to do--and
get shut of her. That is what I should advise. Just a round sum and get
shut of her."

"I've always heard," said Miss Fletcher, "as the money was my lady's,
and not from the Randolph side at all."

"What's hers is his," said Williams; "what's my lady's is her husband's;
and a good bargain too--on her side."

"I declare," cried Fletcher energetically, stung with that sense of
wrong to her own side which gives heat to party feeling--"I declare if
any man took my money to keep up his--his--his old sweetheart, I'd
murder him. I'd take his life, that's what I should do."

"Poor dear," said Mrs. Freshwater, wiping her eyes with her apron. "Poor
dear! She'll never murder no one, my lady. Bless her innocent face. I
only hope as she'll never find it out."

"Sooner than she don't find it out I'll tell her myself," cried
Williams. "Now I don't understand you women. You'd let my lady be
deceived and made game of, rather than tell her."

"Made game of!" cried Fletcher, with a shriek of indignation. "I should
like to see who dared to do that."

"Oh, they'll dare do it, soon enough, and take their fun out of
her--it's just what them foreigners are fond of," said Williams, who
knew them and all their tricks down to the ground, as he said. Still,
however, notwithstanding his evil reports, good Mrs. Freshwater, who was
as good-natured as she was fat, could scarcely make up her mind to
believe all that of the Contessa. "She do look so sweet, and talk so
pretty, not as if she was foreign at all," the housekeeper said.

That evening, however, the Contessa herself took occasion to explain to
Sir Tom what her intentions were. She had thought the subject all over
while she dressed for dinner, with a certain elation in her success, yet
keen clear-mindedness which never deserted her. And then, to be sure,
her object had not been entirely the simple one of getting an invitation
to Park Lane. She had intended something more than this. And she was not
sure of success in that second and still more important point. She meant
that Lady Randolph should endow Bice largely, liberally. She intended to
bring every sort of motive to bear--even some that verged upon
tragedy--to procure this. She had no compunction or faltering on the
subject, for it was not for herself, she said within herself, that she
was scheming, and she did not mean to be foiled. In considering the b