It was an easy and a common thing for Laura Hammond to captivate men, and she really thought nothing about it, unless some deeper purpose, some remoter end, happened, as in the present instance, to be in view; but women, to tell the simple truth, always feared, generally envied, and frequently hated her; she enjoyed her triumph over the "feminine clique," as she disdainfully called them, at Redmoor thoroughly, and with keen cynical appreciation. She played her game steadily all that evening. When the gentlemen came into the drawing-room she almost ignored their presence; she was innocently, ingenuously polite, but she admitted no exclusive attentions; she never relapsed for a moment in her wheedling, but never overdone, civilities to the women. She brought forward the bashful young ladies; she actually played a perfect accompaniment, full of the most enchanting trills and shakes, to a feeble bleat which one of them believed to be a song; and when Sir Charles Mitford, whose ungoverned temper and natural ill-breeding invariably got the better of the conventional restraints which were even yet strange to him, endeavoured to interrupt her proceedings, she stopped him with a stealthy uplifted finger, and a warning glance directed towards his wife. Her victim was persuaded that he fully understood her; he rendered her admirable _ruse_ in his feeble way, the warmest tribute of admiration; and he left the room with a vague consciousness that the indifference which had been for some time his only feeling towards his wife was rapidly turning into hatred. Laura Hammond's own game was not the only one she played that night. Lord Dollamore had watched her quite as closely as Lady Mitford, and to more purpose. He saw that--where sheer recklessness or from some deeper motive,--which he thought he could dimly discern--she was hurrying matters to a crisis, and that he might take advantage of the position which she had created. They were dainty jewelled claws with which he proposed to snatch the fruit he coveted from the fire; but what of that; they were cruel also; and when they had done his work he cared little what became of them. Let them be scorched and burnt; let the sharp talons be torn out from their roots; what cared he? So he watched the feline skill, the deft, supple, graceful dexterity of the woman, with a new interest--personal this time; any he had previously felt had been mere connoisseurship, mere cynical curiosity, in a marked and somewhat rare specimen.