A sudden flush came over her face, her eyes shone, and then Lewis perceived that Miss Margaret, if she had not made up her mind to be elderly and homely, would still be a handsome and imposing personage, whom the society he had known would have admired and followed. He thought that if she had been Sir Patrick's companion his _salon_ might have been very different. With this view he could not help gazing at her with a great curiosity, wondering how she would have filled that place, and thinking what a pity that this, which would have ruined his own prospects, had not been. She looked at him quickly, meeting his gaze, and her eyes fell momentarily under it. "You think me an old fool," she said, "and no wonder. Imprudence--that is always folly when it takes the power of beginning what you cannot finish--would be worse folly than ever in a person like me; but, you see, I never let myself go." "That is not what I was thinking," said Lewis. "I was thinking--wondering, though I had no right--why you did not go to him when he was old." "Go to him--to whom?" she cried, astonished. "Ah! pardon! I have met Sir Patrick--abroad." Miss Margaret turned upon him, and made a close and, as Lewis thought, suspicious inspection of his face. "If you met Sir Patrick abroad, you must have seen that he had no need of his natural family, nor wish for them. There was no place for us there. Perhaps you have not heard that he withdrew his property from his family and gave it to one that was not a drop's blood to him--a creature that had stolen into a silly old man's favour? But no, that would not be known abroad," she added, with a long-drawn breath. Lewis felt himself shrink from her eye; he made a step backward, with a sense of guilt which in all the many discussions of the subject had never affected him before. "No," he said, with an involuntary tone of apology, "no, it was not known, I think, that he had--any relations----" Miss Margaret turned on him again with indignation more scathing than before. "Not known that he had relations!" then she paused, and gave vent to a little laugh, "that must have been by persons who were very ignorant--by people out of society themselves," she said. To this Lewis made no reply. What could he say? It was true that he had no standing in society himself, and he now perceived that he had been guilty of one of his usual imprudences in drawing the attention of a mind much more keen than Miss Jean's, and able to put things together, to himself and his antecedents. After a moment she resumed.