"Yes. Most of his small belongings came into my hands. The affair killed his mother: broke her heart. He was all she had, save one daughter. Sir Karl, do you know what I'd do if I had the power?" fiercely continued Smith. "I would put down by penal laws all these cursed speculators who, men of straw themselves, issue their plausible schemes only to deceive and defraud a confiding, credulous public; all these betting and gambling rogues who lay hold of honest natures to lure them to their destruction. But for them, Philip Salter had been holding up his untarnished head yet." "Ay," assented Karl. "But that will never be, so long as the greed of gold shall last. It is a state of affairs that can belong only to a Utopian world; not to this." He put out his hand to Philip Smith when he left--a thing he had never done voluntarily before--in his sensitive regret for having wronged the man in his heart: and went home with his increased burden of perplexity and pain. CHAPTER X. One Day in her Life. Life was to the last degree dreary for Lucy Andinnian. But for the excitement imparted to her mind from that mysterious building, the Maze, and the trouble connected with it, she could scarcely have continued to go on, and bear. It was not a healthy excitement: no emotion can be that, which has either jealousy or anger for its origin. Let us take one day of her existence, and see what it was: the day following the one last told of. A mellow, bright morning. The pleasant sun, so prolific of his bounties that year, was making the earth glad with his renewed light, and many a heart with it. Not so Lucy's: it seemed to her that never a gleam of gladness could illumine hers again. She sat in her room, partly dressed, after a night of much sleeplessness. What sleep she had was disturbed, as usual, by dreams tinged with the unpleasantness of her waking thoughts. A white wrapper enfolded her, and Aglaé was doing her hair. The woman saw how weary and spiritless her mistress was becoming; but not a suspicion of the true cause suggested itself, for Lucy and her husband took care to keep up appearances, and guarded their secret well. Aglaé attempted to say a word now and again, but received no encouragement: Lucy was buried in a reverie. "We are growing more estranged day by day," ran her thoughts. "He went to London yesterday, and never said why; never gave me the least explanation. After he came home at night, and had taken something to eat, he went out again. To the Maze, of course." "Will my lady please to have her hair in rolls or in plats this morning?" "As you please, Aglaé." And, the weary answer given, her thoughts ran on again.