Perhaps it might be, and Mrs. Vane, as she waited, felt her breath coming fast and short. It seemed an eternity of time until once more he held something out for her to read, and turning silently to where the dead woman lay, drew the sheet tenderly over the worn face. "The irony of fate, indeed," he murmured as she read:-- "Dear Madam,--We have to advise you of the death of our esteemed client, Mr. John Duncan, of Melbourne, Australia, and to inform you that under his will you, as his widow, come into property amounting to close on £100,000." Mrs. Vane's hand holding the letter fell to her side, and Dr. Kennedy's voice said gravely: "Strange, isn't it, that the letter was never opened? All that money, and a pauper's death----" The voice was his, but it might have been the accusing angel's for the effect it had on Violet Vane. She gave one step forward, her arms outstretched as if for pity, and with a little cry sank to her knees. Her head was pillowed on the old woman's breast when Dr. Kennedy, catching her as she fell, found that she had fainted, and anathematised himself as a consummate ass for taking her at her own estimation. Plucky as she was, the contrast had been too sharp. Life and Death--Poverty and Riches. The whole gamut of harmonies and discords lay in these words. CHAPTER XIX. Mrs. Vane being one of those heaven-sent pivots or jewels, without which the wheels of society are apt to come to a standstill, it was only natural that her sudden collapse, joined to the general depression which invariably follows on a country house entertainment, should have reduced the inmates of Gleneira to a condition of blank discontent. To tell truth, a large proportion of them had reasonable cause for a vague uneasiness, if not for actual discomfort, though Lady George wrinkled her high, white forehead in tragic perplexity over some of the resulting phenomena. "Of course," she said at lunch, "I was quite prepared that the cook should give warning. They always do when they have worked hard, and, really, the supper left nothing to be desired; besides, it is an empty form when we are all going away next week. But why the housemaid should want a new set of brushes _to-day_, when she knows I have to send to Glasgow for them; and why Ean, the boy--such a good-looking boy, too--who cleans the boots, should demand an immediate rise in wages, I cannot think." "What's enough for one ain't enough for two," broke in Eve from her sago pudding, with an indescribable twang and a semi-sentimental air. "Mary's going to marry him; he asked her in the boot hole when the piper was playing the 'Blue Bells of Scotland' in the kitching. The thought of her 'ighland laddie bein' gone was too much for her feelinks, so she accepted him, and he gave her a kiss." "Eve!" cried her mother, in horrified accents, "don't say such things."