“Why should I not be her hired slave? I shall still have the right to hate her,” thought Miss Desmond, as she went back to Bayswater with her gloomy charges. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXVII. SEEING A GHOST. Under the perpetual influence of his friend and master, Harcourt Lowther, Mr. Tredethlyn’s days and nights were so fully occupied that he had very little leisure for serious thought. Day by day the patient master taught his deadly lesson; day by day the luckless pupil took his teacher’s precepts more deeply to heart. The simple, credulous nature was as malleable as clay under the practised hand of the modeller, and took any shape Mr. Lowther chose to give it. Francis was fully impressed with the idea that his money had purchased a lovely wife whose heart could never be given to him. All that fair fabric of hopes and dreams which had been his when he married Maude Hillary had been slowly but surely undermined, and there was nothing left of its brightness but the memory that it once had been. He thought of those foolish hopes now with anger and bitterness. Could he at any time have been so mad, so blind, so besotted, as to believe that this beautiful creature, perpetually floating in an atmosphere of frivolity and adulation, would ever fold her wings to nestle tenderly in his rude breast? Othello, recalled to the sense of his declining years and grimy visage by the friendly bluntness of Iago, could scarcely have thought more bitterly of his lovely Venetian bride than Francis thought of Maude after six months’ daily association with his old master. But if the poison was quick to do its deadly work, the antidote was always at hand. With thirty thousand a year and a fine constitution, what need has a young man for reflection? It is all very well for Mr. Young the poet, having failed to obtain wealth or preferment, to retire from a world which has treated him ill, and meditate upon the transitory nature of earthly blessings that he has been unable to obtain; but with youth and thirty thousand per annum, surely no man need be bored by such a darksome guest as dull care. Harcourt Lowther did his best to shield his friend from the gloomy intruder by contriving that Francis Tredethlyn’s existence should be one perpetual fever of hurry and excitement. But though you may carry a man from racecourse to racecourse, by shrieking expresses tearing through the darkness of the night; though you may steep him to the lips in theatres and dancing-halls; though you may drag him from one scene of mad unrest to another, till his tired eyeballs have lost their power to see anything but one wearisome confusion of gas light and colour,--you _cannot_ prevent him from thinking. The involuntary process goes on in spite of him. He will think in a hansom cab tearing over the stones of the Haymarket, in an express train