Mr. Ferrier went up-stairs to write letters.  In a few minutes the man at the window came slowly back toward the fire, staring at the ground.

“The look in the eyes!” he said to himself—­“the mouth!—­the voice!”

He stood by the vast and pompous fireplace—­hanging over the blaze—­the prey of some profound agitation, some flooding onset of memory.  Servants passed and repassed through the hall; sounds loud and merry came from the drawing-room.  Sir James neither saw nor heard.

CHAPTER III

Alicia Drake—­a vision of pale pink—­had just appeared in the long gallery at Tallyn, on her way to dinner.  Her dress, her jewels, and all her minor appointments were of that quality and perfection to which only much thought and plentiful money can attain.  She had not, in fact, been romancing in that account of her afternoon which has been already quoted.  Dress was her weapon and her stock in trade; it was, she said, necessary to her “career.”  And on this plea she steadily exacted in its support a proportion of the family income which left but small pickings for the schooling of her younger brothers and the allowances of her two younger sisters.  But so great were the indulgence and the pride of her parents—­small Devonshire land-owners living on an impoverished estate—­that Alicia’s demands were conceded without a murmur.  They themselves were insignificant folk, who had, in their own opinion, failed in life; and most of their children seemed to them to possess the same ineffective qualities—­or the same absence of qualities—­as themselves.  But Alicia represented their one chance of something brilliant and interesting, something to lift them above their neighbors and break up the monotony of their later lives.  Their devotion was a strange mixture of love and selfishness; at any rate, Alicia could always feel, and did always feel, that she was playing her family’s game as well as her own.

Her own game, of course, came first.  She was not a beauty, in the sense in which Diana Mallory was a beauty; and of that fact she had been perfectly aware after her first apparently careless glance at the new-comer of the afternoon.  But she had points that never failed to attract notice:  a free and rather insolent carriage, audaciously beautiful eyes, a general roundness and softness, and a grace—­unfailing, deliberate, and provocative, even in actions, morally, the most graceless—­that would have alone secured her the “career” on which she was bent.

Of her mental qualities, one of the most profitable was a very shrewd power of observation.  As she swept slowly along the corridor, which overlooked the hall at Tallyn, none of the details of the house were lost upon her.  Tallyn was vast, ugly—­above all, rich.  Henry Marsham, the deceased husband of Lady Lucy and father of Oliver and Mrs. Fotheringham, had made an enormous fortune in the Iron Trade of the