Was he near his triumph? He had been playing for two stakes--the woman he loved and the fortune he envied. He knew Maude Tredethlyn well enough to know that so long as her husband lived, she was as far beyond his reach as the stars which shone down upon him as he walked home from Stuccoville, and of whose light he thought so little. Maude, as the daughter of an insolvent trader, was a lovely being whom he had felt no reluctance to resign; for he had looked forward with a horrible foresight to the day when the girl he loved should be again within his reach; no longer as a penniless spinster, but a wealthy widow. _This_ had been the goal which Harcourt had seen at the end of that weary road along which he conducted the young man who trusted him. No physician ever watched a patient more intently than Mr. Lowther watched the slow undermining of the Cornishman’s glorious constitution under the influence of late hours and hard drinking. The bloodshot eyes, the unsteady hand, the failing appetite, the uncertain spirits, the feverish unrest, were all diagnostics that marked the progress of the schemer’s work. Mr. Lowther had seen so many young men drop down in the poisoned atmosphere to which he introduced Maude’s husband. He hoped that the end which had come to so many would come to this ignorant, blundering rustic, into whose lap blind Plutus had cast the wealth that should have fallen to better men. The end must come; for the stupid Crœsus tumbled so helplessly into the snare, and abandoned himself so completely to his captor’s mercy. It was only a question of patience. The end would come in due time: and then there was the woman he loved, and the richest widow in London, to reward the plotter’s patience, to crown his efforts with happiness and success. To-day’s business, Harcourt Lowther argued, as he played that unfortunate rubber, could not be otherwise than a lucky stroke, likely to hurry matters to a crisis. Francis had slipped out of his hands so often of late, had kept better hours and drunk less. But a serious quarrel with Maude would inevitably fling Mr. Tredethlyn back upon the spurious Lethe of the brandy-bottle, and would hasten the schemer’s work to its fatal close. “I think I have shut the door of his home upon him,” thought Harcourt; “it will be strange if he is not glad to drop completely into the groove in which I want to see him.” This, in plain English, is the plan which Harcourt Lowther had made for himself; though he would scarcely have put his scheme into such very plain words, even in his own thoughts. Iago, in a play or a novel, is obliged to give utterance to his schemes with tolerable clearness; but the real Iago is reticent, even in commune with himself, and huddles his blackest thoughts into some dark corner of his mind, where they lie conveniently hidden from the eye of conscience.