"Mr. Cayley," she said to herself, talking over her projects as a child prattles to its new toys, "fancies Mr. Anerley had thirty or forty thousand pounds. If I send him that, they will all go down to Kent again, and Dove will win her lover back to her with the old associations. They might well marry then, if Will were not as fiercely independent as if he were a Spanish Duke. I could not send him money; if he were to discover it, I should die of shame. But it might be sent to him indirectly as a professional engagement; and then—then they would marry, I know—and perhaps they might even ask me to the wedding. And I should like to go, to see Dove dressed as a bride, and the look on her face!" Dove did not know at that moment what beautiful and generous spirit was scheming with a woman’s wit to secure her welfare—what tender projects were blossoming up, like the white flowers of charity and love, in the midst of the dull and selfish London streets. But when Annie Brunel, having walked still farther westward, entered the house which the Anerleys occupied, and when she came into the room, Dove thought she had never seen the beautiful dark face look so like the face of an angel. CHAPTER XXXVIII. ORMOND PLACE. A still, cold, beautiful morning in March,—the dark crimson sun slowly creeping up behind the tall and leafless trees of the wood on this Berkshire hill. There is snow everywhere,—snow on the far uplands, snow on this sloping forest, snow on the shelving ground that glides down to the banks of the smooth blue waters of the Thames. There is a ruddy glow over that wintry waste of white; for the eastern vapours deaden the light of the sun, and redden it, and steep the far horizon in a soft purple haze. There is not a breath of wind. The sere and withered stems of the tall grey rushes by the riverside are motionless, except when the wild ducks stir in their marshy secrecy, or the water-hens swim out to take a cautious look up and down the stream. Here and there, too, the river catches a streak of crimson and purple, as it lies hushed and still in the hushed, still white meadows. Back from these meadows lies the long low hill which slopes downward to the east, and loses itself in illimitable woods. Up here on its summit is the little village of Steyne—only a church, with a square grey tower, a vicarage smothered in dark ivy, and two or three cottages. Farther along the great bank you come to the woods of Ormond Place; and right in the centre of them, in a great clearance visible for miles round, stands, fronting the river and the broad valley and the far landscape, the house in which Harry Ormond, Marquis of Knottingley, died.