As the waiting went on he grew used to it. He lived in an atmosphere of it. One day this long-planned thing would happen, this long-prepared design would materialise. He hardly noticed the flight of the years. He hardly noticed any material or outward circumstances, except the development of his land. He lived in the nursing, the contemplation, the fondling, of an idea of future vengeance and retribution, when Virginia Sheringham should be at his mercy, and should plead to him--and plead in vain. When at last the scheme did really mature, when the mortgage fell in, he could hardly realise that this had actually happened. He felt dazed, like a man who has lived for years in the dark when he is faced with sudden daylight. It was all happening so ludicrously as he had foreseen. Mrs. Mynors had found out who was the mortgagee, and she had made an appeal--just the kind of appeal he had expected. He found himself taking a ticket for a journey to London for the first time during years. There was nothing to do in London. To wait patiently there was by no means the easy matter that it was in the country, in the midst of his own work upon his own land. To occupy himself he went and saw pictures. He had a taste for pictures, though he never indulged it by buying any. This it was which brought him to Hertford House, and suggested to him a totally new idea--an idea so brilliant, and yet so horrible, that it attracted and repelled him both at once. The shock of the sight of Virginia the younger was so great as partially to unnerve him. Her daughter! He had never thought about her children, except when the death of her son and heir, by means of the motor accident, had appeared in the paper, and he had been glad. Now here was something like a resurrection of the Virginia of twenty years ago. He contemplated her, considered her, appraised her. The whole appearance of her was to him the top-note of luxury, extravagance, affectation. Long residence in the country, avoidance of women, had made him unaccustomed to the growing call for elaborate taste in feminine attire. He had never seen anything like the slim perfection of Virginia. He listened while girl-like she prattled of the costumes of the pictured women on the walls. He heard her wonder gravely whether she could wear rose-colour and contrast her own style with that of her friend! She stood, to the man who glowered upon her, for the incarnation of a type. She was the temptress woman, who would, as her mother had done, enslave and then forsake. Could he prevent the life-long unhappiness of some unfortunate man, by exerting his own will, his own wealth to get the siren into his power?