“He will let me do as I like, and I shall have the vulture’s egg,” she invariably answered. The vulture’s egg was a great diamond, so called, which, while it had been in the possession of each succeeding Duchess of Otterbourne, had rendered her the envied of all her sex. One of the family, present at the battle of Plassy, as a volunteer, had taken it from the turban of a native prince whom he had slain. It was a yellow diamond of great size and effulgence; and if she married Cocky she could, she hoped, wear it at once, as his mother had been dead many years. “You marry that little wretch for the sake of that looted jewel!” said her brother Hurstmanceaux, furious. “Many people don’t marry anything half as nice as a jewel,” she replied calmly, and she persisted and did give her hand to the sickly little man with a classic profile and a ruined constitution, of whom his own father was ashamed. Cocky was a slight, pale, feminine-looking person, with very light eyes, which were usually without any expression at all in them, but now and then at rare intervals could flash with a steely sharpness. His wife knew those electric flashes of those colorless orbs, and was as afraid of them as it was possible to the intrepid nature of a Courcy of Faldon to be ever afraid. Cocky, however, possessed some excellent qualities. Other men were garrulous and confidential after drinking; but the more Cocky drank the more wary and the more silent he became. The tacit compact they made on that day of their betrothal, when they had walked beside the Thames together, was never broken on her side or his. They never interfered with each other, and they were at times almost cordial allies when it was a question of playing into each other’s hands against some detested third person, or of deriving some mutual advantage from some mutual concessions. He usually let her have her own way as she had stipulated, for it was the easiest and most profitable way for himself. He was very lazy and wholly unscrupulous. Many thousands of pounds of good money had been spent on his education; tutors of the best intellect and the best morals had trained him from seven to twenty-one: his father, though a vain man, was of immaculate honor; every kind of inducement and pressure was put on him to be a worthy representative of a noble name; and nature had given him plenty of brains. Yet, so pigheaded is human nature, or so faulty is the English system of patrician education, that Cocky, for all practical result to his bringing up, might have been reared in a taproom and have matriculated in a thieves’ quarter. “Queer, monstrous queer,” thought his father often, with an agony of irritation and regret. “Train a child in the way he should go and hang me if he won’t go just t’other way to spite you.”