Olive Deane rose slowly to her feet. Her face grew whiter; her eyes blacker; her thick brows made a straight, unbroken line across her forehead. If looks had power to slay, Mr. Kelvin would have been annihilated on the spot. But his face was turned the other way. His own thoughts held him. He was gazing meditatively into the fire. "And she--she accepted you, of course?" said Olive, at last, her voice hardly raised above a whisper. "On the contrary, she rejected me." "How I hate her for it!" Then she added, under her breath, "But I should have hated her worse if she had accepted him." "You are the only person in the world, Olive, to whom I have breathed a word of this." "Your confidence is safe with me, Matthew." "I am sure of that, and it is a relief to me to talk to you. To you, Olive, I can always talk as to a sister." "Yes--as to a sister," she said, with a slow nod of the head. Then she shivered slightly, as if with cold, and held out her hands to the blaze. "Go on, Matthew. You are sure of my sympathy in any case." "Need I tell you any more, Olive?" "I want you to tell me all about the affair, from beginning to end. You have piqued my curiosity, and now you must satisfy it." Kelvin paused for a moment or two, as if to pull himself together. "It seems strange to take even you into my confidence," he said, "and yet I feel as if I must tell some one--especially after what happened yesterday. To begin, then. I fell in love with this girl, Eleanor Lloyd--madly, desperately in love. Her father, Jacob Lloyd, was a well-to-do small landowner, whose affairs I managed for him. He seconded my suit, but, as I have said already, the girl rejected me. I am a patient man. I waited six months, and then I spoke to Miss Lloyd again--spoke more warmly and strongly than a less infatuated man would have done. Again she rejected me; this time in a way that I can neither forget nor forgive. I vowed that I would some day humble her haughty pride--and that day has come. Six months ago Jacob Lloyd died without a will. He had been speculating greatly for years, and Eleanor Lloyd, much to her own surprise and that of everyone else, found herself an heiress to the amount of something over twenty thousand pounds. When I first knew this, I thought that the day of my revenge had gone by for ever. But I was wrong. Such was the state of affairs yesterday: to-day they are very different." "In what way are they different to-day?"