"You don't reflect, Mr. Bayne, that though she gets the child's estate if he dies or continues lost--if he lives and this expenditure goes on, she will be penniless--you don't realize that. She will be a poor woman--she will have nothing left of her provision as a widow." "Well, that suits me to the ground," Bayne retorted unexpectedly. "I shall be glad to profit as little as possible by Mr. Royston's property." The notary public, come to take Mrs. Royston's acknowledgment, was announced at the moment, and the two gentlemen, still wrangling, went into the reception room to meet him. Mrs. Marable, her eternal Battenberg in her hands, looked up through the meshes of a perplexity, as visible as if it were a veritable network, at Gladys, who was standing in the recess of the bay-window, a book in her hand. "I didn't understand that remark of Mr. Bayne's as to the poverty of Mr. Royston's widow," the old lady submitted. Gladys, the match-maker, laughed delightedly. "_I did!_" she cried triumphantly. As she went out of the room, she encountered Lillian in the hall, summoned to sign and acknowledge the papers. The flush on the cheek of Gladys, the triumph in her eyes, the laugh in the curves of her beautiful lips, arrested Mrs. Royston's attention. "What are you laughing about?" she asked, in a sort of plaintive wonderment. "About something that Julian said just now." "What was it?" Lillian queried, still bewildered in a sort. The flush deepened on Mrs. Briscoe's cheek, her eyes were full of light, her voice chimed with a sort of secret joy. "I will not tell you!" she cried, and, still smiling, she floated down the hall, her book in her hand.