And the facts--the hard ironic facts, which she could not do away with, scheme as she might! Those inflexible actualities buzzed in her brain, until repetition took the rhythm of the droning wheels underfoot. Pentland was dead, along with his son and heir; Hilda, a widow with two girl babies, who did not count in the succession; Jim was wiped out of social existence, and by her own act. Remained Lionel, the curate, the prig, her one honest man--the Duke of Pentland. Leah could have screamed in the face of this crushing truth. A title at the best, fifty thousand a year, three country seats, a town house, spacious and crammed with beautiful things, and a Scotch moor with an adorable shooting-box. This was the heritage of the new peer! "Of a milk-and-water parson," raged Lady Jim, unjustly, "who will waste everything in charity, and turn the houses into pigsties for the unclean. Oh, Lord, to think that such a clerical ass should get the inside runnings!" This latter phrase she had picked up from Miss Mulrady, and at the moment it seemed expressive. The position would not bear thinking about; yet she had to think, appealing betweenwhiles to the gods-of-things-as-they-are for reasons to justify such shabby treatment. What had she done, that they should be so disagreeable? It was enough to make a truly virtuous woman, as she assuredly could call herself, dance a can-can in Piccadilly. Then she desisted for a few moments from calling the Unseen bad names to lament over her own short-sightedness. To think that she should have sold Jim's birthright for thirty thousand pounds! It was not even one year's income of the Pentland estates. She would have been a Duchess, too; not that she personally cared for rank, but with a higher position she could have trampled the more easily on her enemies. A thought of these flashing into her mind made her clench her fists and grit her teeth. How they would rejoice, the beasts, to think what she had missed, and by how short a period she had missed it! If they had only one neck, as Caligula desired for his enemies, how she would have enjoyed a chop at it! "Oh!" cried Leah, banging the cushions and choking in the dust thus raised--"if I could only bring Jim back!"