Lady Wynde compressed her lips and looked sullen, but, as Sir Harold suggested, the discussion was dropped. The baronet was troubled, and disappointed in the wife he had believed faultless. The first shadow of their married life, the first suspicion of distrust of Lady Wynde in her husband’s mind had come at last, and they were hard to bear. Lady Wynde went to the piano and executed a dashing fantasia, all storm and violence, expressive of her mental condition. Sir Harold moved back from the fire and took up a book, but his grave, saddened face, his steady, intent gaze, and anxious mouth, showed that he was not reading, and that his thoughts were sorrowful. When Lady Wynde had become tired of music, she went up to her rooms without a word to her husband. She entered her sitting-room, made beautiful by her husband’s taste, and going to the fire, knelt down before it on the hearth-rug. Artress and her maid were neither of them to be seen, and the baronet’s wife communed in solitude with her own deformed soul. The winds tore through the trees in the park and on the lawn with a melancholy soughing, and the sound came to the ears of the kneeling woman. Her room was warm and bright with firelight, lamplight, and the glowing hue of crimson furniture. Every luxury was gathered within those walls dedicated to her use. Silken couches and fauteuils, portfolios of choice engravings, rare bronzes on the low marble mantel-piece, exquisite statuettes on carved brackets, albums of scenes in every hand done in water-colors, a beautiful cottage piano, and a hundred other articles made the room a very temple of comfort and beauty, yet in the spot where only loving thoughts of her husband should have had place she dared to harbor thoughts of crime! And that crime the most hideous that can be named--the crime of _murder_! While she was kneeling there, the gray companion stole in softly and silently. Lady Wynde slowly turned her head, recognized the intruder, and stared again with wide eyes into the flames. “You look like a tragedy queen,” said Artress, with a soft laugh like the gurgling of waters. “You look as if you cast away all your scruples, and were ready to carry out the game.” “I am,” said Lady Wynde, in a hard, suppressed voice. “I thought you would come to it. Will Sir Harold make a new will?” “No; he absolutely refuses.” “Well, four thousand pounds a year need not be despised. And perhaps,” added Artress significantly, “we can make the sum larger. Am I to go to town to-morrow?”