"So the improvement seemed likely to last, did it?" she said to herself. But that was sheer nonsense. It had been her lot to see a good deal of sickness and death, and if she had ever seen a man whose hours were numbered, that man was Ambrose Cortelyon. The so-called improvement, as to the nature of which every one about him seemed to be laboring under a misapprehension, was but Nature's expiring effort. She had been a witness of such things before. For a few brief moments the lamp would flame up as brightly as ever it had done, and then would come sudden darkness. It was with an easy mind that she set out next day for London, where some law business connected with her late father's affairs rendered her presence imperatively necessary. She was gone six weeks, during the whole of which time she looked, morning by morning, to receive a letter containing an announcement of the Squire's demise. But none came to hand. It was both unaccountable and disappointing. It would have been such an advantage to her to be able to buy her mourning in town! She journeyed back home in anything but a pleasant frame of mind. It was no longer "dear, noble-hearted Mr. Cortelyon," with her; he was now a "nasty tiresome old man, who ought to be ashamed of himself to be so long a-dying." On this occasion Mrs. Bullivant had a travelling companion in the person of her half-brother, Captain Wilton Ferris, who was a son of the late Mrs. Flood by her first husband. Captain Ferris, who had sold out of the army some years before in consequence of a certain scandal with which his name was prominently mixed up, was a handsome but blasé-looking man of forty. He was well-known in London society as a gambler and a rake who had been black-balled at more than one club. In his time he had gone through two fortunes, his own and his wife's--he was now a widower without family--and for the last few years had been reduced to living by such wits as nature had endowed him with; but at length he had come to the end of his tether. He had received a quiet hint that his presence on the heath at Newmarket was undesirable; men looked shyly on him at the card-table; his reputation with the dice-box seemed to have preceded him wherever he went; pigeons worth the plucking were few and far between; and, worse than all, a bill for five hundred pounds, bearing his signature, would fall due in about ten weeks' time, his failure to take up which would involve nothing less than social ruin--such ruin as was still possible to him--and outlawry. His strait was a desperate one, and, as a last resource, he had come to his half-sister, in the hope that once more--neither for the first nor second time--he might find salvation at her hands.