On her arrival at Hernshaw Castle she cast her eyes round to see what there was to fall in love with; and observed the gamekeeper, Tom Leicester. She gave him a smile or two that won his heart; but there she stopped: for soon the ruddy cheek, brown eyes, manly proportions, and square shoulders of her master attracted this connoisseur in masculine beauty. And then his manner was so genial and hearty, with a smile for everybody. Mrs. Ryder eyed him demurely day by day, and often opened a window slily to watch him unseen. From that she got to throwing herself in his way: and this with such art that he never discovered it, though he fell in with her about the house six times as often as he met his wife or any other inmate. She had already studied his character, and, whether she arranged to meet him full, or to cross him, it was always with a curtsy and a sunshiny smile; he smiled on her in his turn, and felt a certain pleasure at sight of her: for he loved to see people bright and cheerful about him. Then she did, of her own accord, what no other master on earth would have persuaded her to do: looked over his linen; sewed on buttons for him; and sometimes the artful jade deliberately cut a button off a clean shirt, and then came to him and sewed it on during wear. This brought about a contact none knew better than she how to manage to a man's undoing. The eyelashes lowered over her work, deprecating, yet inviting,--the twenty stitches, when six would have done,--the one coy glance at leaving. All this soft witchcraft beset Griffith Gaunt, and told on him; but not as yet in the way his inamorata intended. "Kate," said he one day, "that girl of yours is worth her weight in gold." "Indeed!" said 'Mrs. Gaunt, frigidly; "I have not discovered it." When Caroline found that her master was single-hearted, and loved his wife too well to look elsewhere, instead of hating him, she began to love him more seriously, and to hate his wife, that haughty beauty who took such a husband as a matter of course, and held him tight without troubling her head. It was a coarse age, and in that very county more than one wife had suffered jealous agony from her own domestic. But here the parts were inverted: the lady was at her ease; the servant paid a bitter penalty for her folly. She was now passionately in love, and had to do menial offices for her rival every hour of the day: she must sit with Mrs. Gaunt, and make her dresses, and consult with her how to set off her hateful beauty to the best advantage. She had to dress her, and look daggers at her satin skin and royal neck, and to sit behind her an hour at a time combing and brushing her long golden hair. How she longed to tear a handful of it out, and then run away! Instead of that, her happy rival expected her to be as tender and coaxing with it as Madame de Maintenon was with the Queen's of France.