Go where he might, the Cornishman carried his wife’s image in his heart, and he would have left the most brilliant assemblage in Bohemia for a quiet _tête-à-tête_ in Maude’s boudoir; if his friend Harcourt had not carefully impressed upon him that his entrance into that pretty little chamber was an intrusion only tolerated by Mrs. Tredethlyn’s good nature. There is no need to enter very minutely upon the details of the work which Harcourt Lowther was doing. The art of ruining a well-disposed young man is not a very difficult one; but Mr. Lowther had reduced the art into a science. His great effects were not the sublime hazards of genius, but the calculated results of a carefully studied process. So many nights in a tainted atmosphere; so many Richmond and Greenwich dinners; so many subtle insinuations of Maude’s indifference, must produce such and such an effect. Mr. Lowther displayed none of that impolitic and vulgar haste with which a meaner man might ruin his friend. He never hurried his work by so much as a single step taken before its time. But he never wavered, or relented, or turned aside even for one moment from the course which he had mapped out for himself. So, in the course of that London season, it became quite a common thing for a street hansom to bring Mr. Tredethlyn to the gigantic stuccoed mansion which he called his own in the early sunlight of a spring morning. There were even times when the returning wanderer found it no easy matter to open a door with a patent latch-key, which _would_ go meandering hopelessly over the panel of the door, scratching all manner of eccentric circles and parabolas on the varnish, instead of finding its way into the key-hole. There was one awful night, on which Maude, coming home from some very late assembly, was stumbled against by a tipsy man who was groping his way up the great stone staircase, and found, to her unutterable horror, that the tipsy man--who apologized profusely for tearing half-a-dozen yards of Mechlin from the hem of her skirt, declaring that he was “ver’ sorr’, ’pon m’ wor’; b’t y’ see, m’ dea’ Maurr, if y’ w’ll wear dress s’ long, mussn’ be s’prise get torr t’ piecess”--was her husband. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXVI. A CHILLING RECONCILIATION.