Poor Maude!  That some grievous blow had fallen upon her was all too evident.  Resentment, anguish, bitter despair alternated within her breast, and she seemed really not to care whether she lived or died.  Was it for this that she had schemed, and so successfully, to wrest Lord Hartledon from his promised bride Anne Ashton?  She would lie back in her chair and ask it.  No labour of hers could by any possibility have brought forth a result by which Miss Ashton could be so well avenged.  Heaven is true to itself, and Dr. Ashton had left vengeance with it.  Lady Hartledon looked back on her fleeting triumph; a triumph at the time certainly, but a short one.  It had not fulfilled its golden promises:  that sort of triumph perhaps never does.  It had been followed by ennui, repentance, dissatisfaction with her husband, and it had resulted in a very moonlight sort of happiness, which had at length centred only in the children.  The children!  Maude gave a cry of anguish as she thought of them.  No; take it altogether, the play from the first had not been worth the candle.  And now?  She clasped her thin hands in a frenzy of impotent rage—­with Anne Ashton had lain the real triumph, with herself the sacrifice.  Too well Maude understood a remark her husband once made in answer to a reproach of hers in the first year of their marriage—­that he was thankful not to have wedded Anne.

One morning Sir Alexander Pepps, on his way from the drawing-room to his chariot—­a very old-fashioned chariot that all the world knew well—­paused midway in the hall, with his cane to his nose, and condescended to address the man with the powdered wig who was escorting him.

“Is his lordship at home?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I wish to see him.”

So the wig changed its course, and Sir Alexander was bowed into the presence.  His lordship rose with what the French would call empressement, to receive the great man.

“Thank you, I have not time to sit,” said he, declining the offered chair and standing, cane in hand.  “I have three consultations to-day, and some urgent cases.  I grieve to have a painful duty to fulfil; but I must inform you that Lady Hartledon’s health gives me uneasiness.”

Lord Hartledon did not immediately reply; but it was not from want of genuine concern.

“What is really the matter with her?”

“Debility; nothing else,” replied Sir Alexander.  “But these cases of extreme debility cause so much perplexity.  Where there is no particular disease to treat, and the patient does not rally, why—­”

He understood the doctor’s pause to mean something ominous.  “What can be done?” he asked.  “I have remarked, with pain, that she does not gain strength.  Change of air?  The seaside—­”

“She says she won’t go,” interrupted the physician.  “In fact, her ladyship objects to everything I can suggest or propose.”

“It’s very strange,” said Lord Hartledon.