Sir Gaspard le Marchant lay with closed eyes and stilled heart, his face uninjured, his clothes scarcely disordered, only something in that strange machine we call a body out of gear forever. “Dead!” the man breathed it softly in the light of the flaming carriages, but if he had shrieked it to the sky above him it could not have sounded louder in his own ears. The sound brought back his caution. His long fingers groped deftly in the breast pocket of Sir Gaspard’s coat, and the luck of Marcus Wray lay in his hand! The man was drunk with his success as he turned away. This will need never appear. When the news of Sir Gaspard’s death was telegraphed to Paris an hour later Dubourg would forward his will to Bolton & Carey. Marcus Wray would be out of the transaction, except for being the lawyer employed by chance. Now, the sooner he was out of this the better. He turned away, careless whether the dead were out of the way of the fire or not. Sir Gaspard living, had served him well; Sir Gaspard dead, might burn or be buried. It was all one to Marcus Wray. CHAPTER IX. “I WILL POSSESS HIM OR DIE.” Ismay Trelane stood alone in the great hall at Marchant’s Hold, immaculately dressed in tight-fitting, dark-green cloth that showed every curve of her slim body and seemed reflected in her strange eyes. Her cheeks for once were flushed, and there was a curious light in the glance that she swept deliberately over the luxury around her and finally let rest on her own reflection in the old mirror that hung over the wide fireplace. “All this for one girl!” she whispered. The scarlet of her lips paled with the tight pressure that drew them together. “And she has had it all her life! If I had had one-tenth of it and been brought up like her with white frocks in summer and good warm serge in winter, I might have been quite--a nice girl!” She laughed at her own image in the new clothes bought with Sir Gaspard’s money. But though she laughed, her heart was not merry. She had seen too much that morning of how rich and respectable people lived. She had risen as early as she dared, too restless to stay in bed, and made a slow, careful progress through the big house, fresh from the housemaid’s dusters. The carpets, the silver, the carvings and tapestries, all so solid, so different from those flimsy London furnishings that had been her nearest approach to luxury, made her close her white teeth hard together. They had the same blood in their veins, Cristiane le Marchant and she, and the one had lived like this, while the other--Ismay sickened at the thought of her own neglected, hungry girlhood, that the price of one Turkey carpet might have made at least bearable.