Harrenden House was shut up; its porter alone, stripped of his gorgeous vestments, dwelt behind the gates looking no more like himself than a grub looks like a butterfly. There was a hatchment above the door, large, imposing, majestic; it was there by Margaret Massarene’s wish beyond the usual time to have it shown. All the great people and the smart people who had dined at that house, and pocketed cotillon presents, and drunk rare wines, and borrowed money and paid it by insolent jokes, now drove past in the sunshine or the fog, in the north wind or the east, had found other dupes and other butts for their needs and their jests, and did not even give a thought to “Billy.” He was gone, and there were always new people coming in from the States or the Colonies, or even homemade, who were the natural manure wherewith to nourish starving genealogical trees. “I say, Sourisette, how was it you got nothing under Billy’s will?” said her cousin Roxhall to her one day as they rode in the Park. “My dear Gerald,” she answered with dignity, “_I_ had not sold him an ancestral estate. If I had done so I should not have taken it back as a gift from his daughter as you have done!” “Oh I say,” muttered Roxhall. “That’s a nasty one, but it isn’t the fact. I’ve paid back half the purchase price and the other half is on the land, and it’s not you, Mousie, who have the right to say such things.” Roxhall’s mind reverted to the sale of Vale Royal at Homburg, when he had never looked too closely into the percentage received by the fair negotiatress of the sale. They were speaking as they rode down Rotten Row, and at that moment her mare became fidgety and carried her out of earshot. He rode after her. “You think you can say those things to me,” he said, leaning a little toward her, “because I am a relative, and because I have always been a fool about you; but don’t you put people’s backs up like that, my dear, or you’ll get more than you like some day.” “My dear Gerald,” said Mouse between her teeth, “fall back a little, please; I don’t care to be seen riding with a person who has taken alms from Miss Massarene, even if he _is_ my cousin.” She was not afraid to be insolent to him; Roxhall would be no use any more to her, for he could never sell Vale Royal twice. Roxhall checked his horse and let her groom pass him. This was the woman for whom he had nearly broken his wife’s heart, and more than nearly ruined himself! “What a confounded ass I was!” he thought. “She isn’t worth the tan that her mare kicks up; and yet--and yet--oh, Lord, if she whistled me I should run to her like a dog, I know I should!” He was a clever if careless man of the world, and he was sincerely attached to his wife, but he had been as wax in the hands of his cousin Mouse, and would be so again, he felt, if she cared to make him so. Neither philosophy nor psychology can explain fascination or the power it exercises in the teeth of common sense and to the root of conscience.