Every week from that night until the night before his murder he had looked at that letter and thought, with an inward chuckle, that if he fell down in a fit, or died of a carriage accident, his retaliation was safely arranged to smite her when he should be in his grave. In a rough vague way he believed in a God above him. Most successful persons do. But he did not choose to leave his revenge to the hands of deity. “Always load your rifle yourself,” was his maxim in death as in life. He knew that her brother was the one person on earth whom she feared. And the shell he thus filled to burst after his death would hit hard Hurstmanceaux himself, that damnable swell who would not speak to him even in a street or a club-house, and who had refused his heiress’s hand before it was actually offered to him! “My lord’ll sing small when he learns as his sister was saved from a criminal charge by Billy’s dirty dollars,” he had thought as he had prepared that envelope which his heiress now found in the hush and gloom of Harrenden House. He might have made his vengeance still more cruel. He might have left arrows still more barbed behind him to rankle in the breast of that proud man, of that penniless peer, who would never know him. But he had always attached great importance to reputation for chastity; he felt ashamed to admit in his mature years that he too had felt the temptation of a fair face and of a lovely form. He did not like to confess, even posthumously, his own frailties. So he had only enclosed her signature and Beaumont’s. They spoke for themselves. They were enough; they would leave to himself the glory of a generous action, and to her the shame of a mean one. CHAPTER XXXIII. There was no one in London of the world which had been William Massarene’s highest heaven. The August sun shone on the flower-beds of the parks in all their glory, and the poor forgotten plants which drooped in the balconies before shuttered windows, and the cats, forgotten also, mewed vainly in closed kitchens and behind iron railings, and the dogs, abandoned to servants and grooms, moped sadly in stable or basement yards, or, straying out into the streets and mews, were lassoed by the police or coaxed to their doom by the agents of experimental institutes. Katherine Massarene, all alone, stayed on at Harrenden House, absorbed in the enormous work of examining her late father’s papers. Her mother remained in the country, whither Katherine went from Saturday to Monday to see her. But all the other days of the week the inheritress of Mr. Massarene’s wealth spent in tracing the sources of that poisoned and blood-stained Pactolus.