"I hate you," she gasped. "You’ve killed my love. What right have you to make me suffer? to hurt me so appallingly, mentally, spiritually, physically? When I think of all I’ve got to bear for you it almost drives me mad. It’s too humiliating and degrading. Weeks, months of pain for you—for you that I hate. I’ve seen the doctor to-day; he left just before you came. Nothing can save me. I’ve got to have a child—a child that will be like you, hard, cruel and implacable." For a moment Farquharson sat in silence, aghast, shaken at the torrent of words. This was the explanation, then; the excuse of all the waywardness and hysteria he had not understood. He hardly knew if he was glad or sorry at the news. The dream-wife he had longed for would never now be his; ... the dream-child he had longed for, for whose dear sake he had striven to win Glune.... Dream-bride, dream-mother—he shut his eyes. And Dora was the reality, and Dora was suffering.... His anger died, and a wave of tenderness and sympathy, pity for her as well as for himself, and awe and wonder that even in this moment the new tie pulled at his heart-strings, made him stretch out his arms to her, and take her on his knee almost as though he loved her. "My dear, my dear, forgive me. I didn’t understand or know—I ought to have guessed and been kinder to you," he said, holding her close. But even in the moment of reconciliation a picture shaped itself before his eyes—a picture which he resolutely strove to put away, but which returned again and again during the night. How differently the dream-wife would have told him—and what would it not have meant to him and to her? *CHAPTER V* "Every work that is corruptible shall fail, and the worker thereof shall go with it."—ECCLESIASTICUS. To achieve success by certain ways is not, after all, very difficult. The schemers and plotters, even the merely selfish, have all in their hands for a time. One need not necessarily be wicked to flourish as a green bay-tree. Persistently to use other people to your own ends, to appeal to pity at the right moment, to take what is offered you as your due, without gratitude or sense of obligation, is to lay a very sure nest-egg of security for the future. Brand had planned and schemed to some avail. He had every right to be satisfied with the result. For years he had cherished the remembrance of slights long since forgotten by their authors. Well, he had been able to wipe off a great many of such slights lately. He had struck at Evelyn through Farquharson; he had struck at Lady Wereminster through Evelyn; he had struck at Farquharson through Dora; he would strike at Calvert through Farquharson. It was quite simple, after all, to pull the strings of puppets so foolish as to be swayed by the great forces of love and honour, no matter how important the stage on which they played.