As time passed, and after Arthur and the other children came along, sir Wilton and lady Ann never spoke about the unfortunate business. Perhaps the child had not lived, perhaps he was far away in the obscurity of a commoners’ life. Lady Ann wished him dead, but notwithstanding took every conceivable step to insure the security of the inheritance to her eldest.

As the hostility grew between sir Wilton and his wife, the baronet soon forgot his initial aversion to the ugliness of his phantom firstborn. He began to think—with a great deal of pleasure—how it would serve her ladyship and her brood of icicles, if after all this time, the offspring of a workman’s daughter should appear to oust that of the earl’s.

He lay awake at night, picturing to himself how the woman in the next room would take the sight of him and his son together! But for years he never indulged a single allusion to the idea, allowing her ladyship to refer to Arthur as the heir without the slightest hint at the uncertainty of his position.

Meanwhile, lady Ann, dwelling on what she counted the shame of the lost child’s origin, so far persuaded herself that the vanished child was baseborn and that her husband’s first marriage was no marriage at all.

Thus, she scarcely doubted the possibility, were he to appear, of proving him illegitimate and his claim false, originated by conspiracy. Unable to learn from her husband when and where the baby was baptized, she concluded that he never had been baptized, and thus no record of his birth existed. As years went by and no whisper of his presence was heard, she grew more and more confident. She set herself to encourage Arthur’s relations with the wealthy Barbara and thus to strengthen Arthur’s hand in the eyes of his father.

She had now returned from London, and had found everything as she left it, with the insignificant difference that the bay-window of the library was occupied by a man at work repairing the books.

Sir Wilton, I have said, liked Barbara. She amused him, and amusement was the nearest to sunshine his soul was capable of reaching. All his weather else was gray, with a touch of the lurid on the western horizon—of which he was not weather-wise enough to take heed. He had been at school with Barbara’s father, but did not like her any better for that. In youth they had not been friends, except in a way that brought their interests too much in collision for their friendship to last. It had ended in a quiet hate, each knowing too well how much the other knew to dare an open quarrel.