Theodore Dalbrook, a sensible, hard-headed man of business, was like a puppet in his cousin’s hands. She told him to toil for her, and he deemed himself privileged to be allowed so to labour. She put him upon that which, according to his own conviction, was an absolutely false track, and he was compelled to follow it. She bade him think with her thoughts, and he bent his mind to hers. Yes, she was right perhaps. It was a vendetta. Lord Cheriton had lived all these years hemmed round with unseen, unsuspected foes. They had not burned his ricks, or tried to burn his dwelling-house; they had not slandered him to the neighbourhood in anonymous letters; they had not poisoned his dogs or his pheasants. Such petty malevolence had been too insignificant for them. But they had waited till his fortunes had reached their apogee, till his only child had grown from bud to flower and he had wedded her to an estimable young man of patrician lineage and irreproachable character. And, just when fate was fairest the cowardly blow had been struck—a blow that blighted one young life, and darkened those two other lives sloping towards the grave, the lives of father and mother, rendered desolate because of their daughter’s desolation. Mastered by that will which was his law, the will of the woman he loved, Theodore began to believe as she believed, or at least to think it just possible that there might be amongst the remnant of the Strangway race a man so lost and perverted, so soured by poverty, so envenomed by disgraces and mortifications, eating slowly into the angry heart, like rust into iron, that he had become at last the very incarnation of malignity—hating the man who had prospered while he had failed, hating the owner of his people’s forfeited estate as if that owner had robbed them of it—hating with so passionate a malevolence that nothing less than murder could appease his wrath. Yes, there might be such a man. In the history of mankind there have been such crimes. They are not common in England, happily; but among the Celtic nations they are not uncommon. “My first brief,” mused Theodore, with a grim smile, as he walked up and down the drawing-room while his cousin was writing a memorandum requesting the bailiff’s presence. “It is more like a case entrusted to a detective than submitted to counsel’s opinion; but it will serve to occupy my mind while I am eating my dinners. My poor Juanita! Will her loss seem less, I wonder, when she has discovered the hand that widowed her?”