“I imagine so.  She answers the description that Miriam gave of her photograph.  Yes, hark! she has just opened her door, and surely that was a baby’s cry.”

“Well, at last we have seen her,” returned the girl, “and I must confess, I think she is perfectly lovely.  She has such beautiful eyes, such a fair, delicate complexion, and is so peculiarly dainty every way.  I do not blame Sir William for falling in love with her.”

“Mercy, Sadie, how you do chatter! no one would believe, to hear you, that you had been almost heart-broken because this very girl, over whom you are so enthusiastic, had ruined your prospects,” returned her mother, impatiently.

The young girl flushed crimson at this shaft.

“Thank you, mamma, for reminding me of the fact,” she said, bitterly.  “It is true that through her all my fondest hopes have been blighted, and I suppose I ought to bitterly hate her for it; but truly her exceeding beauty and sweetness half disarm me.”

The elder woman made no reply to this, but her manner betrayed both contempt and irritation, her brow was clouded with a wrathful expression, and her lips were drawn into a straight, rigid line, denoting some cruel and inflexible purpose.

It will readily be surmised that these two ladies were none other than Mrs. Farnum and her daughter, who, as we learned in the previous chapter, were traveling in the United States, in the hope of improving the health and spirits of the latter.

Mrs. Farnum had married while very young, and was the mother of three children—­two sons and one daughter.

She had herself been very attractive as a girl, and had many suitors; but with an eye to the comforts of life, she had said “no” to all the titled and impecunious lovers, and given her hand to a man of wealth, who, with his million of pounds, bade fair to add another million to them in the course of time.

Miriam Heath, on the contrary, had been rather a plain-looking girl, somewhat cold and repelling in manner, and was almost an old maid before she was married; thus she was often an inmate of her friend’s palatial home, and became much interested in her children, and little Sadie Farnum had scarcely reached her teens before the two women began to plan a union between the young heir of Heathdale and the heiress to half a million pounds.

It had been the cherished dream of years, while almost from childhood Sadie had been foolishly taught to regard Heathdale as her future home, and to look upon Sir William as her promised husband; thus the disappointment had been a terrible one to them all when they learned that the baronet had married a “nobody” from the hated and disloyal country that had rebelled against its rightful sovereign.

Lady Linton might be said to have become almost a monomaniac upon this point, and so bitter was her ire at thus being balked in her plans, so keen her hatred of the innocent girl who had been the cause of it, that she abandoned herself to the wildest schemes, casting all honor and womanliness to the winds, and bending all her energies toward the destruction of the happiness of the newly wedded couple.  She resolved to begin operations by making an ally of her friend, Mrs. Farnum.