and the suspicion (it was nothing more) that he now had as to the original cause of their transfer to the lawyer.  He said what he had said before, that he could not force his daughter into a marriage with him, but that if she chose to agree to it he should offer no objection.  And there the matter stood.  Once or twice Edward had met Ida walking or driving.  She bowed to him coldly and that was all.  Indeed he had only one crumb of comfort in his daily bread of disappointment, and the hope deferred which, where a lady is concerned, makes the heart more than normally sick, and it was that he knew his hated rival, Colonel Quaritch, had been forbidden the Castle, and that intercourse between him and Ida was practically at an end.

But he was a dogged and persevering man; he knew the power of money and the shifts to which people can be driven who are made desperate by the want of it.  He knew, too, that it is no rare thing for women who are attached to one man to sell themselves to another of their own free will, realising that love may pass, but wealth (if the settlements are properly drawn) does not.  Therefore he still hoped that with so many circumstances bringing an ever-increasing pressure upon her, Ida’s spirit would in time be broken, her resistance would collapse, and he would have his will.  Nor, as the sequel will show, was that hope a baseless one.

As for his infatuation there was literally no limit to it.  It broke out in all sorts of ways, and for miles round was a matter of public notoriety and gossip.  Over the mantelpiece in his sitting-room was a fresh example of it.  By one means and another he had obtained several photographs of Ida, notably one of her in a court dress which she had worn two or three years before, when her brother James had insisted upon her being presented.  These photographs he caused to be enlarged and then, at the cost of 500 pounds, commissioned a well-known artist to paint from them a full-length life-size portrait of Ida in her court dress.  This order had been executed, and the portrait, which although the colouring was not entirely satisfactory was still an effective likeness and a fine piece of work, now hung in a splendid frame over his mantelpiece.

There, on the afternoon in question, he sat before the fire, his eyes fixed upon the portrait, of which the outline was beginning to grow dim in the waning December light, when the servant girl came in and announced that a lady wished to speak to him.  He asked what her name was, and the girl said that she did not know, because she had her veil down and was wrapped up in a big cloak.

In due course the lady was shown up.  He had relapsed into his reverie, for nothing seemed to interest him much now unless it had to do with Ida—­and he knew that the lady could not be Ida, because the girl said that she was short.  As it happened, he sat with his right ear, in which he was deaf, towards the door, so that between his infirmity and his dreams he never heard Belle—­for it was she—­enter the room.