Lady Ann would not let her hope go. She grew daily more fearful of the cloud that hung in the future. Out of it might at any moment step the child of her enemy, the low-born woman who had dared to be lady Lestrange before her! For her son Arthur not to succeed him would be a morsel to sweeten her husband’s death, if only to spite her.

At one crisis in their history he had placed a will in her hands that left everything to her son, but he might have made ten wills after that! She knew she had done nothing to please him. She had, in fact, never spent a thought on making life good for the man she had married. She wished she might try to make herself agreeable to him.

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.