"Some servant maid waiting to come in to clear the table," he muttered. But he returned to the dining-room, and drank off a glass of liquor before going to the drawing-room, from which ripples of Jack's frank laughter were floating in the hall. Lady Bell was seated at the piano, playing and singing in her light-hearted, careless fashion; Jack and Una were seated in a dimly-lit corner, talking in an undertone. Stephen went up to the piano and stood apparently listening intently, but in reality watching the other two under his lowered lids. The presence of the rose in his bosom seemed to heighten the passion which burned in his heart; and the sight of Jack bending over Una, and of her rapt, up-turned face as she looked up, drinking in his lightest word as if it were gospel, maddened him. It was with a start that he became conscious that Lady Bell had ceased playing, and that she, like him, was watching the lovers. "Miss Una and Mr. Newcombe seem very good friends," she said, with a forced smile. "Do they not?" said Stephen, in his softest voice. "Too good." Lady Bell looked up at him quickly. "What do you mean?" Stephen looked down at her gravely. "Can you keep a secret, Lady Bell?" he said, hesitatingly. "Sometimes," she said. "What is it?" Stephen glanced across at Jack and Una. "I'm rather anxious about our young friends," he said, his voice dropped still lower, his head bent forward with such an insidious smile that Lady Bell could not, for the life of her, help thinking of a serpent. "Anxious!" she echoed, her heart beating. "As how?" "Can you not guess?" he said, raising his eyebrows. "You--you mean that they may fall in love with each other. Well, they are not badly matched," said Lady Bell, bravely, though her heart was aching. "Not badly, in one sense," said Stephen, after a pause; "but as badly as two persons could be in all others. They are a match as regards their means. They are both penniless." Lady Bell looked up with a start. "Is--is Mr. Newcombe so badly off? I thought--that is, I fancied he had a wealthy uncle----" She paused. "You mean Mr. Ralph Davenant," said Stephen, calmly, and with an air of sadness. "I am sorry to say that he left everything which he possessed to a less worthy person--to me." Lady Bell looked at him inquiringly. "To me," he repeated, "and poor Jack was--well, disinherited, and left penniless. It is of him I think when I say that I am anxious about them; naturally, I think of him. Miss Rolfe is a friend of my mother's, and has been used to a straitened life; but poor Jack does not know what poverty means, and in his ignorance may drift into an entanglement which may embitter her life. No man in the world is less fitted for love in a cottage, and nothing to pay the rent, than Jack Newcombe. You, who have seen something of him, must have remarked his easy-going, careless nature, his utter ignorance of the value of money, his unsuitableness for a life of poverty and privation."