There was a certain look in Roland Bosworth's countenance which Mrs. Layburne knew meant the irrevocable. She subsided into her position of obedient housekeeper, she who had once been sovereign ruler of this man's life. It was so long ago, that golden age of beauty and power, when Barbara Layburne's singing and Barbara Layburne's face were the rage at the theatre in the Haymarket, where she had sung in English opera, and for one brief season had been almost as much admired and talked about as La Faustina or Cuzzoni were in later years. She looked back across the mist of years, and wondered if she were verily the same woman at whose feet lovers had been sighing when the century was young. The gulf betwixt youth and age, betwixt loveliness and gray hairs, is such a tremendous abyss, that it is not strange if a woman should half doubt her own identity, looking across that terrible ravine and seeing the vision of her past existence on the other side. No two women living could be more different than that woman of the past and this woman of the present. Lady Tredgold was an energetic personage who lived at Bath for the greater part of the year, gambled moderately, and contrived to support a numerous family upon a small income, which her husband, a staunch Walpolian, had improved by his senatorial opportunities. She had seen very little of her sister's husband since his wife's death, Mr. Bosworth having done his uttermost to keep his wife's relations at a distance. She felt flattered at his application, and lost no time in providing a governess for her niece, in the person of an elderly Frenchwoman, small, shrivelled, and slightly lame, who had taught her ladyship's four daughters, and prepared her three sons for Eton. The opportunity thus afforded provided a home for Mademoiselle Latour, and saved Lord Tredgold the pension which duty would have constrained him to provide for the superannuated governess.