He made it a practice to hunt up charming country cottages or handsomely furnished suites of rooms and to offer such liberal terms for them as tempted their owners to take a lodger in for once, in order to earn an extra honest penny. Then Mr Selby, who had sung the praises of his accomplice sky-high, would superintend the installation of that individual with much empressement. The lady, whom he always represented as rich, and whom he endowed with fictitious relationship to people of note, who would have repudiated all connection with her, would bring her maid and her bosom female crony, a certain Miss Losteel, and they and the reputed guardian would eat and drink the poor hosts into ruination. This would last until the latter began to look askance at the idea of always receiving excuses instead of money, and then the gang would suddenly seek fresh victims. Oddly enough, the victimised hosts generally found that some of their treasured knick-knacks always disappeared at the same time as their swindling lady lodger, who, while the spell of her fascination lasted, borrowed money for stamps, stationery, railway fares, and any other thing for which money is absolutely needed. The woman was short, squat, dark, and of curious, square set features. While under the aegis of the charm which she could use at will, people found all sorts of excuses for her constant lapses into vulgarity, and smiled at the egregious vanity she displayed. Once fully alive to the unscrupulous creature’s real nature, they wondered how such an ugly incarnation of selfishness could ever have fascinated them, and were inclined to attribute her power to sorcery, or hypnotism, or to anything but the deep-laid plots of mere cunning. After Miss Reede’s marriage to Mr Calmour, the whilom guardian (he posed as “uncle” at Dieppe) lived in bachelor chambers in London in great style, and did not even trouble to go to the office in which he had formerly done occasional business of a shady sort. He had money enough to live upon, and I had no difficulty in surmising whence it came. Soon after Mrs Calmour succeeded to the estates Mr Selby developed into a property buyer. He figured at several of the purchases of land sold by the widow. As the latter showed no signs of being better off for all the cash she got, I inferred that it found its way back into Mr Selby’s possession, and that the latest scheme was intended to divert the ownership of the property to the nominal purchaser, instead of the widow. I argued that there must be a reason for this, and the painstaking researches I made resulted in the astounding discovery that the couple were really man and wife. They had found it pay better to profess a different relationship. The marriage with Mr Calmour was, therefore, null and void. But I was not quite sure that this fact would suffice to restore her fortune to Mrs Churchill.