cup of bliss untasted?  Flight?  Ah! whither could she flee?  The thought of the misery she would leave behind her, the disgrace that would fall upon her mother—­this would alone make flight impossible.  Yet could she conceive life such as this prolonging itself into the hopeless years, renunciation her strength and her reward, duty a grinning skeleton at her bedside?  It grew harder daily.  More than a year ago she thought that the worst was over, and since then had known the solace of self-forgetful idealisms, of ascetic striving.  It was all illusion, the spinning of a desolate heart.  There was no help now, for she knew herself and the world.  Foolish, foolish child, who with her own hand had flung away the jewel of existence like a thing of no price!  Her lot appeared single in its haplessness.  She thought of Stella, of Letty, even of Alice; they had not been doomed to learn in suffering.  To her, alone of all women, knowledge had come with a curse.

A month passed.  Since Rodman’s departure from Wanley, ’Arry Mutimer was living at the Manor.  Her husband and ’Arry were Adela’s sole companions; the former she dreaded, the approach of the latter always caused her insuperable disgust.  To Letty there was born a son; Adela could not bend to the little one with a whole heart; her own desolate motherhood wailed the more bitterly.

Once more a change was coming.  Alice and her husband were going to spend August at a French watering-place, and Mutimer proposed to join them for a fortnight; Adela of course would be of the party.  The invitation came from Rodman, who had reasons for wishing to get his brother-in-law aside for a little quiet talk.  Rodman had large views, was at present pondering a financial scheme in which he needed a partner—­one with capital of course.  He knew that New Wanley was proving anything but a prosperous concern, commercially speaking; he divined, moreover, that Mutimer was not wholly satisfied with the state of affairs.  By judicious management the Socialist might even be induced to abandon the non-paying enterprise, and, though not perhaps ostensibly, embark in one that promised very different results—­at all events to Mr. Rodman.  The scheme was not of mushroom growth; it dated from a time but little posterior to Mr. Rodman’s first meeting with Alice Mutimer.  ’Arry had been granted appetising sniffs at the cookery in progress, though the youth was naturally left without precise information as to the ingredients.  The result was a surprising self-restraint on ’Arry’s part.  The influence which poor Keene had so bunglingly tried to obtain over him, the more astute Mr. Rodman had compassed without difficulty; beginning with the loan of small sums, to be repaid when ’Arry attained his majority, he little by little made the prospective man of capital the creature of his directions; in something less than two more years Rodman looked to find ample recompense for his expenditure. and trouble.  But that was a mere parergon; to secure Richard Mutimer was the great end steadily held in view.