The fair denizens of Bohemia, to whom he had introduced Francis, were not generally devoted to floriculture in cottage-gardens, though they were greedy of gigantic bouquets, to rest on the velvet cushions of their opera-boxes, or the front seats of their carriages, when they drove to race meetings. Who was this pale, worn-looking young woman, who called Francis cousin? Was she really his cousin, that Cornish girl of whom the soldier had told his master in Van Diemen’s Land, and whose miserably-executed likeness had reminded Harcourt of another face, whose owner had played some part in the experience of his life? Was this inhabitant of the newly-furnished cottage really the Cornish cousin? Mr. Lowther could scarcely imagine that it was so; for, in that case, why should Francis have kept her existence a secret from his _fidus Achates_ in the person of Harcourt himself? “Secrecy is only another name for guilt,” thought Mr. Lowther. “Our friend has gone to the bad in real earnest this time, and I can make a _coup_. I was getting very tired of the slow game.” Armed with this information, the schemer went back to town, to take his place in Maude’s opera-box, and to lead up to that idea of a morning at the Cedars, which seemed to originate in Mrs. Tredethlyn’s own brain. Chance, which had been against him so long, had gone with him unfailingly in this business. The lucky moment had come; he had got his lead at last, and had only to play his winning cards. Chance had been constant to the schemer even in that interview between Francis and Rosa; for it had happened that, in all Miss Grunderson’s candid outpourings, she had not dropped a word about Mrs. Tredethlyn’s stroll in the Petersham meadows; though, even if she had done so, the Cornishman might have been very slow to perceive that an accidental glimpse of himself and gentle Susy, in friendly companionship, could have been the primary cause of that stormy greeting which he had received at the hands of his wife. Francis accepted his wife’s passionate outburst as only the climax of the disgust and weariness with which he had inspired her. “She reproaches me for the life I have been leading lately,” he said bitterly; “but she does not understand her own feelings. It is not my life, but me she hates. It is myself that inspires the loathing and contempt which she talked of, and not my late hours or my gambling and horse-racing.” After sitting for some time plunged in a gloomy reverie, in the dreary library, where the backs of the books he never opened seemed to frown upon him in their sombre Russia leather brownness, Francis stirred as the little black marble clock on the mantel-piece chimed the quarter after twelve, and felt in his waistcoat-pocket for a note which he had found waiting for him on his table the previous night. It was a tiny twisted _poulet_ from Harcourt Lowther:--