It was, despite its preservation of Nature’s gifts, and despite its forced smiles, the face of a selfish, cruel pessimist, disappointed in her past and with no uplifting faith to brighten the future. The Baroness had been the wife of Judge Lawrence a number of years, before she relinquished her hopes of one day making Preston Cheney respond to the passion which burned unquenched in her breast. It had been with the idea of augmenting the interests of the man whom she believed to be her future lover, that she aided and urged on her husband in his efforts to procure place and honour for his son-in-law. It was this idea which caused her to widen the breach between wife and husband by every subtle means in her power; and it was when this idea began to lose colour and substance and drop away among the wreckage of past hopes, that the Baroness ceased to compliment and began to taunt Preston Cheney with his dependence upon his father-in-law, and to otherwise goad and torment the unhappy man. And Preston Cheney grew into the habit of staying anywhere longer than at home. During the last ten years the Baroness had seemed to abandon all thoughts of gallant adventure. When the woman who has found life and pleasures only in coquetry and conquest is forced to relinquish these delights, she becomes either very devout or very malicious. The Baroness was devoid of religious feelings, and she became, therefore, the most bitter and caustic of cynical critics at heart, though she guarded her expression of these sentiments from policy. Yet to Mabel she expressed herself freely, knowing that her listener enjoyed no conversation so much as that of gossip and criticism. A beautiful or attractive woman was the target for her most cruel shafts of sarcasm, and indeed no woman was safe from her secret malice save Mabel and Alice, over whom she found it a greater pleasure to exercise her hypnotic control. For Alice, indeed, the Baroness entertained a peculiar affection. The fact that she was the child of the man to whom she had given the strongest passion of her life, and the girl’s lack of personal beauty, and her unfortunate physical condition, awoke a medley of love, pity and protection in the heart of this strange woman. CHAPTER VIII THE Baroness had always been a churchgoing woman, yet she had never united with any church, or subscribed to any creed. Religious observance was only an implement of social warfare with her. Wherever her lot was cast, she made it her business to discover which church the fashionable people of the town frequented, and to become a familiar and liberal-handed personage in that edifice.