‘What am I to say, uncle?’

’Wouldst like me to make a new will, and halve it between John and Fred?  It wouldna’ be fair to Fred, not rightly fair, because he’s run his risk for th’ lot.  But wouldst like it, lass?’

There was a trace of the old vitality in his shrivelled features, as he laid this offering on the altar of her feminine charm.

‘Oh, do, uncle!’ she was about to say eagerly, but she thought in the same instant of John standing over Meshach’s body, with the ice-cold cloth in his hand, and something, some dim instinct of a fundamental propriety, prevented her from uttering those words.  ’I would like you to do whatever you think right,’ she answered with calmness.

Meshach was evidently disappointed.

‘I shall see,’ he ejaculated.  And after a pause, ‘John’s i’ smooth water again, isn’t he?  I meant to ask Dain.’

‘I think so,’ said Leonora.

She had become restive.  Soon afterwards she bade him good-night and departed.  And all the way up to Hillport she speculated upon the chances of finding Arthur in her drawing-room when she got home.

* * * * *

As she passed through the hall she knew at once that Arthur was not in the house and had not been there; and the agitation of her heart subsided suddenly into the melancholy stillness of defeated hope.  She sadly admitted that she no longer knew herself, and that the Leonora of old had been supplanted by a creature of incalculable moods, a feeble victim of strange crises of secret folly.  Through the open door of the drawing-room she could see Rose reading, and Millicent searching among a pile of music on the piano.  Bessie emerged from the dining-room with a white cloth and the crumb-tray.

‘Master’s in there,’ said Bessie; ‘they didn’t wait tea, ma’am.’

Leonora went into the dining-room, where John sat alone at the bare mahogany, smoking.  With her deep knowledge of him, she detected instantly that he had been annoyed by her absence from tea.  The condition of the sharp end of his cigar showed that he was perturbed, fretful, and perhaps in a state of suspense.  ‘Well,’ she thought with resignation, ‘I may as well play the wife,’ and she sat down in a chair near him, put her purse on the table, and smiled generously.  Then she raised her veil, loosed the buttons of her new black coat, and began to draw off her gloves.

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said, and to her surprise his tone was extremely pacific.

‘Have you?’ she answered, intensifying all her alluring grace.  ’I hurried home.’

‘Yes, I wanted to ask you——­’ He stopped, ostensibly to put the cigar into his meerschaum holder.

She perceived that the desire to ingratiate fought within him against his vexation, and she wondered, with a touch of cynicism, what new scheme had got possession of him, and how her assistance was necessary to it.