If he had it, her foolhardiness alone had put it in his hands. “He would not dare to use it,” she thought, and wiped her upper lip, that was wet. “It must be he who has the girl; no one else would be bold enough. And if he has her, he would not keep her. The money that I meant----” The pain struck her heart again, and more dizzily than ever she caught at the table for support. When it passed she could no longer force herself to think. Dim visions passed before her eyes of a boy she had loved; of another, a half-grown lad, whom she had not known existed till he was brought home from Eton and coolly introduced to her as Erceldonne’s eldest son; of a baby girl she had loathed because she was what a fair-haired boy could never be; of a thing she had done to make a man stand in terror of her, and for hatred of a woman who had never wronged her. It had been in that man’s interest to keep Mother Felicitas quiet--if he knew her secret--all of it!--or not. If he knew! She groaned aloud. He must have found out something or he would never have burdened himself with a homeless girl, long ago thought dead and gone. He must know about the money, and meant it and the girl to go to his son with the hard, brown eyes, for whose sake another lad had been turned out on the world to sink or swim as he liked. Hand in hand, the miserable woman seemed to see that brown-eyed boy and that baby girl, though the years had long since made them man and woman. If they stood so, indeed, Erceldonne could defy her, could afford to stand aside in silence and let her old sins come to light. Looking back, Mother Felicitas could see with what a devilish cleverness he had always stood aside, trusting to chance and the hour to do what he dared not put his hand to. Only once had she known him to show any trace of human feeling--when he took that fair-haired boy, who had no other real name but Guy, from the third-rate school, where he was a half-starved teacher, and gave him five hundred pounds to start for himself in sugar-planting in Jamaica. She knew that was true, for she had seen the boy’s grateful letters to the man he only knew as a distant friend of his father. It had been sent to her, she knew very well by whom, as the easiest way of telling a professed nun. It began: “My dear Mr. Egerton,” but Mother Felicitas knew that Lord Erceldonne’s conscience would not require him to tell the truth when he did a kindness. That memory had softened her heart a little to the man she hated; it was as well for him that she did not know the bloody fragments of that uncashed check had lain on a sunny hillside till they blew away, instead of being cashed at Lord Erceldonne’s bankers. “I can’t remember that; it wouldn’t save me,” she thought restlessly. “I must think of myself.” While there was life in her she would make one struggle more; once more, perhaps, feel the joy of power stir in her and bring a hard man to terms.