must be dissolved—­was a scheme which she could now plainly see must be abandoned as hopeless, in the case of Michael Vanstone’s son.  The father’s habits of speculation had been the pivot on which the whole machinery of her meditated conspiracy had been constructed to turn.  No such vantage-ground was discoverable in the doubly sordid character of the son.  Noel Vanstone was invulnerable on the very point which had presented itself in his father as open to attack.

Having reached this conclusion, how was she to shape her future course?  What new means could she discover which would lead her secretly to her end, in defiance of Mrs. Lecount’s malicious vigilance and Noel Vanstone’s miserly distrust?

She was seated before the looking-glass, mechanically combing out her hair, while that all-important consideration occupied her mind.  The agitation of the moment had raised a feverish color in her cheeks, and had brightened the light in her large gray eyes.  She was conscious of looking her best; conscious how her beauty gained by contrast, after the removal of the disguise.  Her lovely light brown hair looked thicker and softer than ever, now that it had escaped from its imprisonment under the gray wig.  She twisted it this way and that, with quick, dexterous fingers; she laid it in masses on her shoulders; she threw it back from them in a heap and turned sidewise to see how it fell—­to see her back and shoulders freed from the artificial deformities of the padded cloak.  After a moment she faced the looking-glass once more; plunged both hands deep in her hair; and, resting her elbows on the table, looked closer and closer at the reflection of herself, until her breath began to dim the glass.  “I can twist any man alive round my finger,” she thought, with a smile of superb triumph, “as long as I keep my looks!  If that contemptible wretch saw me now—­” She shrank from following that thought to its end, with a sudden horror of herself:  she drew back from the glass, shuddering, and put her hands over her face.  “Oh, Frank!” she murmured, “but for you, what a wretch I might be!” Her eager fingers snatched the little white silk bag from its hiding-place in her bosom; her lips devoured it with silent kisses.  “My darling! my angel!  Oh, Frank, how I love you!” The tears gushed into her eyes.  She passionately dried them, restored the bag to its place, and turned her back on the looking-glass.  “No more of myself,” she thought; “no more of my mad, miserable self for to-day!”

Shrinking from all further contemplation of her next step in advance—­shrinking from the fast-darkening future, with which Noel Vanstone was now associated in her inmost thoughts—­she looked impatiently about the room for some homely occupation which might take her out of herself.  The disguise which she had flung down between the wall and the bed recurred to her memory.  It was impossible to leave it there.  Mrs. Wragge (now occupied in sorting her parcels) might weary of her employment, might come in again at a moment’s notice, might pass near the bed, and see the gray cloak.  What was to be done?