Jane had never heard of him before this day, or of his decoration, grand old place and fine rent-roll, at all. He merely did her the injustice which an eligible man is apt to do a girl who seems to like him-of thinking her mercenary, and of being ready to leap into matrimony with any man who could please her well at first sight.

Now, the Honourable Jane was very much a child of nature still. In the old impecunious, uncultivated days at Bath, she had been left, as has been told, very much to her own devices and she had caught up the dangerous trick of responding with fatal celerity to any one or anything that showed her kindness. Her love of being loved, or at least liked, had grown and strengthened on the nipping system which Florence had applied to it. If a cur wagged its tail to her affably in the street, she forthwith wanted to take that cur home, and nourish and cherish it. If a man paid her a little courteous attention, she instantly longed to do him some kindness in return, especially if the man was nice. The idea of matrimony had scarcely entered her head yet. In course of time she supposed she would marry, but no individual man had suggested the supposition to her. So now she really felt grateful to Captain Stafford for the kind way in which he had enlarged the borders of her special floral loves, and showed her gratitude by listening with delighted attention to every word he spoke.

These words were not many. Helen's presence threw a shade over what had been, a few minutes before, the sunniest manner Jane had ever seen displayed by man. The habit of loving Helen had been upon him for so many years that it seemed like beginning life anew to find that henceforth the habit must be relinquished. Though she had not told him in so many words, he realised that she was going to marry Lord Roydmore. Her remarks about his carnations being better adapted to her mature years than the yellow roses which belonged to bygone days and Harry Stafford had unmistakably pointed to that conclusion, and though, when he entered the house, he had been as averse to marrying her as a man well could be, he now felt annoyed that to this other conclusion affairs had come. His mood was contradictory, but essentially human, and his heart was not caught in the rebound by Jane's beauty, youth and grateful desire to please him. When he left them, as he did very soon, it was on

Helen that his eyes lingered last, and it was Helen's hand-the cruel hand that had just crushed the last bit of romance out of their affair-which won the warmest pressure from his. Already he had forgotten the episode of the flower lesson. Already he had forgotten the thrilling touch of Jane's confiding little fingers. In the presence of the married woman, who diffused such an atmosphere of autumnal splendour, the spring-like beauty and freshness of the young girl was shone down effectually.

There was a brief silence between the two women after the door had closed after him, then Helen asked:

"What do you think of Captain Stafford, Jane?"

"He has made every other man scem insignificant.”

"You susceptible goose," Mrs. Collette said laughing, but not unkindly. "Well, my dear, I may as well tell you he has a way of making other men seem insignificant in most women's eyes I am glad you like him. I want you——”

She pulled herself up abruptly. Even she could not bring herself to say that she wanted another woman to do more than like Harry Stafford.

She was as little addicted to the folly of indulging in useless retrospection as any woman that ever lived. But she could not obliterate in a moment the memory of all the fond fooling which had gone on between them for years. She knew that, if she had beguiled him into marrying her, that her seniority would have told against her in his heart and taste in a very short time. Nevertheless, the thought that he had wanted to marry her once was passing pleasant to her.

Jane had been wandering about the room while these thoughts flew through Helen's mind, and now the girl spoke, and turned Mrs. Collette's mind from the past to the future.

"Your carnations are lovely. Apparently you're as fond of them as papa, only the habit of old days is upon him so strongly that he won't indulge in the extravagance of buying more than one at a time for his buttonhole."

It was an excellent opportunity for breaking the ice. Should she take it? For a few seconds Helen hesitated; then she said:

"As he is such a niggard about them as regards himselt, you'll be surprised to hear that it was Lord Roydmore who sent me all these."

Jane came across the room with a bound and stood by her friend's chair, her head thrown up and a look of anger on her face.

"If he did, he must be infatuated, gone silly about you. How can you encourage him to do it—an old man like papa ?” "Perhaps I may not consider him silly for being 'infatuated,' as you call it, with me. Indeed, I am very much flattered."

"

'But it's horrid of you to lead him on to make himself ridiculous, for, of course, you wouldn't think of him, an old man like papa, with a son of twenty-six."

"I think of him so much that I have promised to marry him,” Helen said calmly.

CHAPTER VII.

TROUBLE AT THE COURT.

THERE was trouble at The Court. The adoring young husband and the adored young wife had been having the most serious difference which had yet disturbed their married lives.

For some months past Mrs. Graves had been living a life of the wildest excitement, in spite of that life being spent in the pure and peaceful country in which she had been wont to declare she felt buried alive. She was alternately a prey to the most exuberant happiness and the most dismal depression. Remorse had not become her portion yet, but recklessness had done so, for she had joined the army of female gamblers which is devastating the land, and was looked upon as one of its most. promising recruits.

The beginning of this miserable end had been at the house of a country neighbour, who had a few years ago made an enormous fortune out of one of the wealthiest mines in Cornwall. Finding that his family had no chance of rising in the social scale down near the cradle of their race, he brought them up to Somersetshire; bought a magnificent property with a grand old hall upon it, and started as a gentleman, "who 'ad no call to turn his 'and to anything any longer."

His wife was past that period of life when a vulgar woman can by some occult means be transmuted into a smart one. But she was an easy, affable, kind-mannered woman, who allowed a

clever maid to dictate what she should wear, and permitted her daughters to order her when to speak and when to be silent. She was also always ready to open her purse and let its contents flow out freely whenever she was appealed to for any cause, deserving or the reverse. It gave her no pain when she found that, in spite of the ancestral hall and the regiment of servants, the gorgeous furniture and handsome carriages and horses, the county held aloof from her and hers. But her son and two daughters were anything but resigned to this state of things. The son had been got into a cavalry regiment. The daughters had been well-educated on the surface, and though neither clever nor accomplished, could hold their own conversationally in a slangy, smart way, that gained them the gratifying reputation of being "jolly girls, real ripping ones, with no nonsense about them." They were very gallant, too, and unquestionably deserved the order for distinguished service in the social field. They were always sallying forth and bidding the select, who looked askew at them, enter into their father's hospitable halls, and be dined, and luncheoned, and fêted in every conceivable way. And they were always meeting with rebuffs when they did so.

Their name was not a bad-sounding one, though it was borne by hundreds of the fisher and mining folk in and around the barren little Cornish village where they had been born. Penarth has quite a pretty and almost a distinguished tone about it when it is sacred to one family only in a neighbourhood. They humbly thanked Providence that they had not to bear the burden of a hideous surname in addition to the absence of h's from the vocabulary of their papa and mamma. And they bore the buffetings they received from the Somerset county people philosophically, feeling sure that the day would come when the Penarths would be able to buffet other aspirants in their turn.

They had great, and as it turned out justifiable, reliance on their brother Arthur. He was regarded rather as a bit of a cad in the corps to which he belonged; at the same time he had the recognised power of the purse in it. One autumn he was able to bring down three or four men of family, means, position and current smartness, to stay at the Hall for ten days. It happened to be young Mrs. Graves' first autumn in Somersetshire, and she became absorbed into the Penarth circle with a celerity that

flattered them immensely, for Mrs. Graves, senior (Geoffrey's mother), and his exemplary sisters had held themselves not only aloof from, but aloft over the Penarths, and it pleased them well, therefore, to draw the younger, brighter representative of the Graves' into their net.

The people whom she ought to have cottoned to and liked were dull. Day after day, existence dragged on its dreary, changeless round at The Court. Everything about her was substantially comfortable and well assured, and there was much that was beautiful in the time-sanctified home to which her husband had brought her. But Florence Graves soon got to look upon old oak carving, antique silver, priceless china and rare jewellery that was not entailed, as so much convertible property merely. "What's the use of anything, save so much money as 'twill bring?" became her motto.

To bring men of the right stamp down to the Hall had been the work of young Mr. Penarth. To retain them there, to get them to recur and bring others along with them, was the pleasing task assigned to the Misses Penarth. They soon learnt from their brother that, in order to do this, they must inaugurate some other form of entertainment wherewith to while away the hours of the night than amateur music, billiards and conversation especially as neither the native music nor the conversation were of a brilliant order. So play became the order of the night, and the game they played was baccarat.

The recklessness and utter absence of science in the game commended itself speedily and strongly to Florence Graves. One of the most skilled performers at the specially-prepared magic table instructed her in its mysteries, and before Geoffrey realised that " Flo's new fad" was more than a mere pastime, she had become inoculated with such a love for it, as made life without it seem a dismal waste.

When she won, she was so dazzlingly happy that her husband had not the heart to check her; and when she lost, she bore the blow so bravely, and defrayed her debts of honour so secretly, that he knew nothing about it. But still the unceasing, unresting way in which she followed up her intimacy with the Penarths annoyed and perplexed him. She allowed them to absorb her completely into their circle, and almost put her on her honour to stand by them when the traditional, time