But it was too late! Sir Wilton would instantly imagine a rumour of the lost heir and be on the alert. If only he hadn’t yet made a later will! He must die someday—why not in time to make his death of use?

How far over the line that separates guilt from greed, lady Ann might have gone had she been sure of not being found out, she herself could not have told. The look of things is very different at night and in the morning. The bed-chamber can shelter what would be a horror in a court of justice. A conscience at peace in its own darkness will shudder in the light of public opinion. It is marvellous that what we call the public, a mere imbecile as to judgment, should yet possess the Godlike power of awakening the individual conscience—and that with its own large dullness of conscience! Truly the relation of the world to its maker cannot primarily be an intellectual one—it must be a relation tremendously deeper! We do not, to speak after the manner of men, come of God’s intellect but of his imagination. He did not make us with his hands, but loved us out of his heart.

The same week in which sir Wilton had given that will into his lady’s keeping, he executed a second, in which he made the virtue of the former depend on the nonappearance of the lost heir. Of this will he said nothing to his wife. Even from the grave he would hold a shadowy yet potent rod over her and her family! Lady Ann, however, suspected something of the sort, and spent every secret moment searching for some such hidden torpedo.

But there was one thing which sir Wilton protected better than his honour—his bunch of keys.

After the return of the Lestranges and the Wylders to their country homes, having prevailed on Mrs. Wylder to pay her a visit, lady Ann initiated an attempt to gain her cooperation in the alliance of the houses. She opened upon her the same artillery she had employed against her husband. Mrs. Wylder sat for some time quietly listening but looking so much like her daughter that lady Ann saw the mother’s and not the father’s was the alliance to seek. Thereupon she pulled out the best gun in her battery, as she thought, and began to hint her fear that Miss Wylder had taken a fancy to a person unworthy of her.

“Girls who have not been much in society,” she said, “are not unfrequently the sport of strange infatuations! I myself knew an earl’s daughter who married a baker! I do not, of course, imagine your daughter guilty of the slightest impropriety—”

Scarcely had the word left her lips, when a fury stood before her—eyes flashing and mouth set.

“How dare you hint that my Bab has not behaved with prudence!” cried Mrs. Wylder like a thundercloud.

Lady Ann was not of a breed familiar with fear, but for the first time in her life, except in the presence of her mother, a more formidable person than herself, she did feel a little afraid—of what exactly she would have found it hard to say.