Among the acquaintances formed by Eleanor Hill in the early days of her residence under the roof of Dr. Pomeroy, had been the family of Robert Brand, which the doctor visited (as he did many others in the neighborhood) both as friend and medical attendant. In those days she had been visited by Elsie Brand and her brother, and had visited them in return. Gradually all intimacy between Elsie and herself had ceased, as that great change, known only to herself and two others, affected the whole tenor of her life. But the friendship at that time formed with Carlton Brand had never weakened, and it perhaps grew the stronger from the hour when each became satisfied that no warmer personal interest would ever rise in the breast of the other. Perhaps Carlton Brand, to some extent a man of the world, and a close student of character by virtue of his profession, may have formed his opinions, long before 1861, of the relations existing between the doctor and his ward; but if so, he had not a thought of blame or any depreciation of respect for the poor girl on account of it; and during all those years, if he indeed harbored such suspicions, he had no means of verifying them, for Eleanor Hill's lips had been and remained quite as closely sealed to him as to others. Between Dr. Philip Pomeroy and the lawyer had always existed, since the young girl had been an inmate of the house, an antagonism which could not well be mistaken. No open rupture had taken place, in the knowledge of any acquaintance of either; but they never met without exchanging looks which told of mutual dislike and distrust. Within the three years between 1858 and 1861 that antagonism, as even the unobservant girl could see, had markedly increased, so that even in his own house the doctor, when he came upon him, seldom addressed a word to his unwelcome guest. Had she known that in the investigations which followed the failure of the Dunderhaven Coal and Mining Company, in the later days of the great commercial crash of 1857-8, Carlton Brand had been one of the counsel employed to prosecute that great swindle in which her own fortune had been swallowed up with hundreds of others,--had she known this, we say, she might have imagined some reason for this increase of dislike which was certainly not founded upon jealousy. But she would not have guessed, even then, one tithe of the causes for deadly and life-long hatred which lay between two men of corresponding eminence in two equally liberal professions. It is not possible, at this stage of the narration, to explain what were those causes, eventually so certain to develop themselves.