She accepted unquestioningly all that Harcourt Lowther had told her. Her husband was false to her. There was so much in Francis Tredethlyn’s life since his marriage which seemed an evidence of his accuser’s truth. And then Harcourt had not wished to accuse. The cruel revelation had been extorted from him. No trouble that Maude had ever yet endured had been so bitter as that which had come upon her to-day,--the shame, the humiliation, the unutterable horror of that discovery made in the summer sunshine, amidst the perfume of flowers, the joyous carolling of a skylark high up in the warm blue sky. She did not love her husband; and the agony which gnawed her breast during this homeward journey was the sharp pang which belongs to wounded pride rather than to betrayed affection. At least this was what she said to herself, as she remembered, with an angry flush upon her brow, those sneering remarks of Mr. Lowther’s about her love for such a man as Francis Tredethlyn. “I do believe he loved me once, let Harcourt Lowther say what he will; and he was nobly generous to my father; and now he deserts me altogether, and devotes himself to some horrible woman!” thought Mrs. Tredethlyn, whose ideas were not particularly sequential this evening. She meditated upon so much as she knew of the life that Francis had led since the close of his honeymoon. His late hours, his frequent absences, all seemed to confirm Harcourt’s account of dissipated habits and degraded tastes. Yes, everything combined to prove the miserable truth. She was a neglected wife; abandoned by the man who had once seemed the veriest slave that ever bowed beneath the supreme dominion of Love. She remembered what he had been, or what she had believed him to be, and was all the more indignant with him for the discoveries of to-day. Rosa Grunderson, anxiously watching Mrs. Tredethlyn in the twilight, wondered that so dark a cloud could overshadow the fair face of her friend. “It must be something very dreadful,” thought Rosa; “but whatever it is, that Mr. Lowther is at the bottom of it. If Roderick does propose,--which I’ve every reason to think he will, from the way he conducted himself on the terrace,--and he and pa can come to any arrangement about me, I won’t have much to do with my brother-in-law, that’s certain, for I hate him. But I dare say those horrid ground-rents will always stand in the way of my being married to anybody but a Rothschild; and Rothschilds don’t trouble _themselves_ about ground-rents.”