One thought was ever present to her; it may be said that it had never left her mind since the day her husband died: that Benja was chief of Alnwick Hall, with all its wealth and dignity; that she, Charlotte St. John, so arrogant by nature, was there only on sufferance, a home accorded to her as his personal guardian; and that George was as nobody. They were as a sharp thorn, these reflections, ever piercing her. They ate into her ill-regulated heart and rankled there. And they went on to another thought, an unwholesome thought, which would have been a wicked thought but that it was not there of her own will: a thought that carried danger in its train. In the first waking of early morning, in the fevered dreams of midnight solitude, in the glare and bustle of noonday, it was ever thrusting itself forward--if Benja were to die, her child would be the inheritor. Was she aware of its danger? No. And yet she was fond of tracing it back to its original source--the accident to Benja. When the boy was taken out of the water, drowned as was supposed, and a some one called out, the wild beating of Mrs. St. John's bosom--_not with sorrow_--called into life the thought that had certainly never existed there before, or else had lain dormant. Her increasing dislike of Benja should have acted as a warning to her. It was generated by the false view she took of the existing state of things: that Benja was a sort of ogre, whose sole mission on earth was to stand in the light of her child and deprive him of what might have been his birthright. She strove against this dislike--it might be better to call it hatred, for it had grown into that--and she had to exercise a constant check upon herself in her behaviour towards him. None but she knew what it cost her to treat Benja with a semblance of love, or to make no very apparent difference between the children. She did strive against it--let us do her justice!--not from any suspicion of danger, but from her own sense of equity. That very morning, in taking Benja's part and kissing him, she had acted from an impulse of good principle, an endeavour to do right. But no sooner were the children out of her sight, than the old bad feelings got the better of her, and she sat indulging all sorts of foolish dreams and visions of what she would do were Alnwick George's instead of Benja's. Will you believe that she had fallen into the habit of repeating their Christian names to herself, with the prospective title before them? "Sir Benjamin St. John," "Sir George St. John;" and she thought the one (you need not ask which of the two) sounded a thousand times more charming than the other.