Lady Maude was nothing loth.  Young, beautiful, vain, selfish, she yet possessed a woman’s susceptible heart; though surrounded with luxury, dress, pomp, show, which are said to deaden the feelings, and in some measure do deaden them, Lady Maude insensibly managed to fall in love, as deeply as ever did an obscure damsel of romance.  She had first met him two years before, when he was Viscount Elster; had liked him then.  Their relationship sanctioned their being now much together, and the Lady Maude lost her heart to him.

Would it bring forth fruit, this scheming of the countess-dowager’s, and Maude’s own love?  In her wildest hopes the old woman never dreamed of what that fruit would be; or, unscrupulous as she was by habit, unfeeling by nature, she might have carried away Maude from Hartledon within the hour of their arrival.

Of the three parties more immediately concerned, the only innocent one—­innocent of any intentions—­was Lord Hartledon.  He liked Maude very well as a cousin, but otherwise he did not care for her.  They might succeed—­at least, had circumstances gone on well, they might have succeeded—­in winning him at last; but it would not have been from love.  His present feeling towards Maude was one of indifference; and of marriage at all he had not begun to think.

Val Elster, on the contrary, regarded Maude with warm admiration.  Her beauty had charms for him, and he had been oftener at her side but for the watchful countess-dowager.  It would have been horrible had Maude fallen in love with the wrong brother, and the old lady grew to hate him for the fear, as well as on her own score.  The feeling of dislike, begun in Val’s childhood, had ripened in the last month or two to almost open warfare.  He was always in the way.  Many a time when Lord Hartledon might have enjoyed a tete-a-tete with Maude, Val Elster was there to spoil it.

But the culminating point had arrived one day, when Val, half laughingly, half seriously, told the dowager, who had been provoking him almost beyond endurance, that she might spare her angling in regard to Maude, for Hartledon would never bite.  But that he took his pleasant face beyond her reach, it might have suffered, for her fingers were held out alarmingly.

From that time she took another little scheme into her hands—­that of getting Percival Elster out of his brother’s favour and his brother’s house.  Val, on his part, seriously advised his brother not to allow the Kirtons to come to Hartledon; and this reached the ears of the dowager.  You may be sure it did not tend to soothe her.  Lord Hartledon only laughed at Val, saying they might come if they liked; what did it matter?

But, strange to say, Val Elster was as a very reed in the hands of the old woman.  Let her once get hold of him, and she could turn him any way she pleased.  He felt afraid of her, and bent to her will.  The feeling may have had its rise partly in the fear instilled into his boyhood, partly in the yielding nature of his disposition.  However that might be, it was a fact; and Val could no more have openly opposed the resolute, sharp-tongued old woman to her face than he could have changed his nature.  He rarely called her anything but “ma’am,” as their nurse had taught him and his brothers and sisters to do in those long-past years.