"I could not find him," she said, kneeling down before the fire, and holding out her shivering arms to the blaze. "I hope and trust he has escaped. One man's life is enough for me to have upon my hands, without having two." "Oh, Aunt Selina! _you_ did not take Philip King's life!" "No, I did not take it. And I have been guilty of no intentional wrong. But I did set the one against the other, Anne—in my vanity and wilfulness." Looking back to the child's eyes with which I saw things then, and judging of these same things with my woman's experience now, I can but hold Selina Barley entirely to blame. An indulged daughter, born when her sister Ursula was nearly grown, she had been suffered to have her own way at Keppe-Carew, and grew up to think the world was made for her. Dangerously attractive, fond to excess of admiration, she had probably encouraged Philip King's boyish fancy, and then turned round upon him for it. At the previous Easter, on his former visit, she had been all smiles and sweetness; this time she had done nothing but turn him into ridicule. "What is sport to you may be death to me," says the fly to the spider. It might not have mattered so much from _her_, this ridicule; but she pressed George Heneage into the service: and Philip King was not of a disposition to bear it tamely. His weak health made him appear somewhat of a coward; he was not strong enough to take the law into his own hands, and repay Mr. Heneage with personal chastisement. Selina's liking for George Heneage was no doubt great; but it was not an improper liking, although the world—the little world at Mr. Edwin Barley's—might have wished to deem it so. Before she married Mr. Edwin Barley, she refused George Heneage, and laughed at him for proposing to her. She should wed a rich man, she told him, or none at all. It was Mr. Edwin Barley himself who invited Heneage to his house, and also Philip King, as it most unfortunately happened. His wife, in her wilful folly—I had almost written her wilful wickedness—played them off, one upon another. The first day they met, Philip King took umbrage at some remark of Mr. Heneage's, and Selina, liking the one, and disliking the other, forthwith began. A few days on, and young King so far forgot his good manners as to tell her she "liked that Coxcomb Heneage too much." The reproach made her laugh; but she, nevertheless, out of pure mischief, did what she could to confirm Philip King in the impression. He, Philip King, took to talk of this to Miss Delves; he took to watch Selina and George Heneage; there could be little doubt that he carried tales of his observation to Mr. Edwin Barley, which only incited Selina to persevere; the whole thing amused her immensely. What passed between Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Barley, in private about it, whether anything or nothing, was never known. At the moment of the accident he was exceedingly vexed with her; _incensed_ may be the proper word.