The Hon. Hector was a notorious gambler and _roué_, and within a couple of years of his marriage he had contrived to dissipate his wife's fortune to the last guinea. A few months later he came by his end in a drunken brawl, greatly to the relief of everybody connected with him, leaving behind him one child, a boy a little over twelve months old. Then the widow went back home to her father, taking her son with her. Not long afterwards Mr. Flood was carried off in a fit of apoplexy. When his will was read it was a terrible disappointment to Onoria to find that, instead of coming in for everything, as she had all along been led to expect she would, she was merely left an income of six hundred a year, together with the Uplands estate, and that everything else was left in trust for her son. She had known that her father was not likely to be a long liver, and, backed up by his wealth, she had looked forward to a brilliant _rentrée_ into London society at no very distant date, with, it may be, a second and more brilliant marriage in the background. It was, indeed, a terrible disappointment. Mrs. Bullivant at this period of her life was what is generally understood by the term "a fine woman," that is to say, she was built on ample lines, and was of generous proportions. Later on she would tend to obesity. She was black-eyed and black-haired, with regular features of a cold, statuesque type, which, as she was essentially unemotional and a thorough specimen of ingrained selfishness, formed a fair enough index to her disposition. Such was the woman who came one day to see Squire Cortelyon on what she had been given to understand was likely to be his deathbed. As a matter of course, she knew of the quarrel between father and son, of Dick's untimely death, and of his having left a widow and a child whom the old man refused to acknowledge or to recognize in any way. She and the Squire had not met since a little while before her marriage; still, it seemed only what was due to good feeling and neighborly sympathy, more especially in view of what had happened in the past, that she should be desirous of seeing him once again before it was too late. If there was any other motive, or half-motive, at work below the surface, she would hardly have confessed its existence even to herself.