"What is to be done?" the old lady had asked, one morning when the papers had appeared with an account of a mad exploit in which the well-known initials Lord Y---- W---- had clearly indicated his complicity. "I do not know," she had replied. "I do not think there is anything to be done." "Do you mean that he is to be allowed to go on like this, to drift to ruin without a hand to stay him?" demanded the old lady almost wrathfully; and the countess had turned on her angrily. "Who can do anything to stay him? Have you yourself not said that it is impossible, that he must be left alone?" "I did, yes, I did," admitted the old countess, "but things were not so bad then, not nearly. All this is different. There is a woman in the case, Ethel!" "Yes," said the countess, bitterly, "there is," and she felt tempted to echo the assertion which Leycester had been reputed to utter, "that if there had been no women the world would have been worth living in." Then Lady Longford had attempted to "get at" Leycester through his companion Lord Charles, but Lord Charles had plainly intimated his helplessness. "Going wrong," he said, shaking his head. "If Leycester's going wrong, so am I, because, don't you see, I'm bound to go with him. Always did, you know, and can't leave him now; too late in the day." "And so you'll let your bosom friend go to the dogs"--the old lady had almost used a stronger word--"rather than say a word to stop him?" "Say a word!" retorted Lord Charles, ruefully. "I've said twenty. Only yesterday I told him the pace couldn't last; but he only laughed and told me that was his business, and that it would last long enough for him." "Lord Charles, you are a fool!" exclaimed the old lady. And Lord Charles had shook his head. "I daresay I am," he said, not a whit offended. "I always was where Leycester was concerned." The one creature in the world--excepting Stella--who could have influenced him, knew nothing of what was going on. The excitement of her visit to Stella, and her terrible interview during it, had utterly prostrated the delicate girl, and Lilian lay in her room in the mansion in Grosvenor Square, looking more like the flower namesake than ever. The doctor had insisted that no excitement of any kind was to be permitted to approach her, and they had kept the rumors and stories of Leycester's doings from her knowledge.