“Poor little Tommy,” she said, with a demure and measured tone, which was put on to hide her emotion, “only three years old; is it possible that he is the master, of all this--that everything depends on him?” “Poor child!” said Fanshawe. What a farce these words seemed! Oh happy child, blessed child, most fortunate baby, with eighteen years of a minority before him, and his aunt, Inverna Bassett, the only clever one of the family to do everything for him! But she dared not betray the exultation that coursed through all her veins. “I hope Miss Heriot will come to see us to-morrow,” she said. “It will be better for--all of us--if she will be friendly and come.” Somehow there was a change of inflection in this which caught Fanshawe’s ear. He was quite incapable of defining what it meant. The rapid revolution of sentiment, the change from humility and doubt into superiority and certainty, the implied warning, too delicate to be a threat, that it would be better “for all of us” that the daughter of the house should visit its new mistress, all these gradations of thought went beyond his capacity. He did not understand; but still his ear, though not his intelligence, caught some change in the tone. “I do not think,” he said, with some coldness, though he could not have told why, “that we shall be able to persuade Miss Heriot to rest beyond to-day.” “I am glad of that,” said Verna. “I mean I shall be very glad to see her. I saw her, it is true, yesterday, here, but she did not notice me. Of course it was a terrible moment for her--and for all of us,” she added, with a little meaning. “Matty’s first coming home--” Was there a little emphasis on that last word? Certainly there was a change of tone. Fanshawe was confused; he could not quite tell why. As for Verna, her little brain was in a whirl. She wanted to be alone to think. She put up her eye-glass once more, and inspected the house with such a wild sense of power that her faculties for the moment seemed taken from her. “Good evening,” she said, hastily. “I think I will go back to my poor sister, who has no one but me to take thought for her.” How everything had changed! She had no need now to be civil to anybody; no need to put on any mask, or restrain her real feelings. She rushed into the house, and upstairs, full of her discovery; but before she reached her sister’s room, her steps grew slower, and her thoughts less eager. Verna was ignorant, very ignorant. How did she know that there might not be some law, or some will, or something that would modify this too delightful, too glorious state of affairs?