“It is all our own fault,” she thought. “Why do we let these boors and brutes in at our gates because they have got their sacks of bullion on their backs?” And as she always blamed somebody for the issue of her own errors, she thought with detestation of Cocky coming up to her under the trees at Homburg, and telling her to make the acquaintance of the Massarenes. Happily for her William Massarene was too cautious, too busy, and too ambitious a man to lose much of his time in torturing her. He delighted in her hatred, her helplessness, her servitude, but she was only a toy to him; his gigantic schemes of self-advancement, and his many financial enterprises, engrossed him much more, and he would not have risked his social position by a scandal for all the beautiful women in creation. He supplied her with the money she wanted, but he made her beg, and he made her sign, for every penny of it. It was fine sport! Her own people attributed the change in her to her rupture with Brancepeth; and, in himself, Hurstmanceaux did so also. But it was a subject on which he could know nothing since the scene she had with him concerning her late friend, and he could only suppose that like many another woman she sorrowed for the loss of what she had refused to keep. He knew that she stayed a good deal with the folks at Vale Royal, but his penetration did not go farther than to conclude that she did so because it saved her expense. He saw nothing of her personally in the autumn and winter following Cocky’s death; his unavoidable communications with her on business were made by letter. Sometimes he wondered how she and the lady with whom he had walked to Greater Thorpe got on together; he did not think that they could suit each other; but he saw little of the one and nothing at all of the other. Of William Massarene he of course saw nothing either; so that the curt and insolent tone which Massarene at times now allowed himself to use to one whose humble slave he had once been was unknown to him; if he had heard it and resented it, the “bull-dozing boss” would have cast the truth in his teeth, and, grinning, have awaited his reception of it, for courage had never been lacking to the man who for thirty years had held his own against the hatred of the whole Central States. This terror lest he should thus tell the truth to her brother haunted her night and day. She did not think there was much fear because she knew that he held his social position as dear as life itself, and he would be well aware that Hurstmanceaux would destroy it at a blow. Still she could not be sure, for she knew that temper sometimes hurries the wisest and most ambitious man into irrevocable indiscretion.