Elizabeth had always been kind and flattering to Darrell’s friends, not only out of respect for him, but from the pleasure which every woman takes in exercising the conscious power to please. But now she was if anything more attractive to them than ever, and Darrell enjoyed a delight most gratifying to his pride in finding himself the preferred admirer of a charming wife who was admired by every man who knew her. Elizabeth felt, without one word being spoken, that her conduct was approved by Pelham. She sometimes suspected what Pelham never did, that he, rather than she, deserved credit for the lofty purity of their relations, and doubted whether after all Pelham were not stronger in a sense of honor and rectitude even than herself, so great was his mastery over her. For, after all, the greatest power which one human being can exercise over another is the power of uplifting and making better; and such Elizabeth felt was Pelham’s influence over her, just as Pelham felt that Elizabeth was his guardian angel. The Darrells and Pelham spent all together four years at Embira. Every year Elizabeth thought she would be able to return to America to see her father, if for only a few weeks, but every year the Darrell exchequer showed the impossibility of this. Their narrow means did not permit them to travel, or even to entertain except in the simplest manner, and Elizabeth only remained well dressed from the fact that she knew how to make her own gowns better than most Regent Street dressmakers. They often joked and laughed about their old relative Lady Pelham’s fortune, which was to come first to Darrell, and, failing a son and heir, to Pelham. Darrell dolefully related how Lady Pelham’s mother had lived to be ninety–six, and her father to be ninety–seven, and not one of her uncles or aunts had died under ninety years of age, while the lady herself was not more than fifty years of age and reckoned the most robust woman in England. They built castles in the air, of what they would do when they got the Pelham fortune, and Darrell tried to induce Pelham to agree to a division of the spoils in advance. It was a great joke; but one day, nearly nine years after Elizabeth’s marriage, death came to the three lives which stood between Darrell and Lady Pelham’s money, and Darrell came into the life estate of a fortune of forty thousand pounds. _Chapter Five_