"Beautiful place, Fanny." "Is it?" "So peaceful after the city." "I prefer town." "Fanny!" "Uncle Lawrence." "What are you going to do?" She had not looked at him before, but now she raised her eyes to his. She might as well have closed them. Dropping them, she looked upon the floor and said nothing. "I'm sorry for you, Fanny." She looked fierce. There was a snake-like stealthiness in her appearance, which Alfred's mother saw across the room and trembled. Then she raised her eyes again to her uncle's, and said, with a kind of hissing sneer, "Indeed, Uncle Lawrence, thank you for nothing. It's not very hard for you to be sorry." Not dismayed, not even surprised by this speech, Lawrence was about to reply, but she struck in, "No, no; I don't want to hear it. I've been cheated, and I'll have my revenge. As for you, my respected uncle, you have played your cards better." He was surprised and perplexed. "Why, Fanny, what cards? What do you mean?" "I mean that an old fox is a sly fox," said she, with the hissing sneer. Lawrence looked at her in amazement. "I mean that sly old foxes who have lined their own nests can afford to pity a young one who gets a silver shoe-buckle," hissed Fanny, with bitter malignity. "If Alfred Dinks were not a hopeless fool, he'd break the will. Better wills than this have been broken by good lawyers before now. Probably," she added suddenly, with a sarcastic smile, "my dear uncle does not wish to have the will broken?" Lawrence Newt was pondering what possible interest she thought he could have in the will. "What difference could it make to me in any case, Fanny?" "Only the difference of a million of dollars," said she, with her teeth set. Gradually her meaning dawned upon Lawrence Newt. With a mingled pain, and contempt, and surprise, and a half-startled apprehension that others might have thought the same thing, and that all kinds of disagreeable consequences might flow from such misapprehension, he perceived what she was thinking of, and said, so suddenly and sharply that even Fanny started, "You think I want to marry Hope Wayne?" "Of course I do. So does every body else. Do you suppose we have not known of your intimacies? Do you think we have heard nothing of your meetings all winter with that artist and Amy Waring, and your reading poetry, and your talking poetry?" said Fanny, with infinite contempt.