"Mr. Aldermaston, you are _impayable!_" said Dollamore. "I must pay a compliment to your perspicacity, even at the risk of forestalling the conclusion of your narrative. But you have told it so admirably, that no man with a grain of sense in his head could avoid seeing that Madame Poitevin is Mrs. Hammond." "Exactly,--I have not a doubt of it," said the little man; "and if so, I think you and I, my lord, know some one whose state of mind must be awful." "Yes," said Lord Dollamore, rising from his chair; "I see what you mean, and you are doubtless right. Poor Percy Hammond's relatives must feel it acutely. Goodnight, Mr. Aldermaston;" and he bowed and moved off. "I'm not going to let that little cad indulge in any speculations about the Mitfords," said he to his stick. "That woman's far too good to be discussed by such vermin as that;" by which we may judge that Lord Dollamore's opinion of Lady Mitford had altered as his acquaintance with her had progressed. The deductions which Mr. Aldermaston had made from this last experiment in espionage were tolerably correct. Laura Hammond was in Baden under the name of Madame Poitevin, and accompanied by the never-failing Marcelline. She had hurried away from London for two reasons. The first, and by far the most important, was to perfect the conquest of Tchernigow; to clinch home that iron band which for the last two months she had been fitting round the Russian's neck; to bring him to make the offer of his hand at once. The short time passed in London since her husband's death had been spent in looking her future boldly in the face, and calculating within herself how she should mould it for the best. Lord Dollamore was right in one of his conjectures about her: she had made up her mind that the course of her life must henceforth be entirely altered. She knew well enough that even the short time she had been away from London and its world was sufficient to render her name almost forgotten; and she determined that when it was next mentioned it should be in a very different tone from that formerly adopted towards it. Respectability--that state so often sneered at and ridiculed by her--she now held in the highest veneration, and determined to attain to. She had her work to do; to restore herself in the world's good opinion, and to make, as soon as decency would permit, a good marriage. The last position gained, the first would necessarily follow. All she had to do, she thought, was to keep herself in seclusion and choose her intended victim.