Alas, no! she loved him. Not because she believed him to be good and honourable—not because she was blinded to the baseness of his nature. She loved him in spite of her knowledge of his real character—she yielded to the influence of an infatuation which she was so powerless to resist that she might almost be pardoned for believing herself the victim of a baleful destiny.
"It is my fate," she murmured to herself, after this last revelation of her lover's infamy. "It must needs be my fate, since women with less claim to be loved than I possess are so happy as to win the devotion of good and brave men. It is my fate to love a cheat and trickster, on whose constancy I have so poor a hold that a breath may sever the miserable bond that unites us."
Victor Carrington was one of the first persons whom Reginald Eversleigh introduced to Madame Durski after her arrival in England. She was pleased with the quiet and graceful manners of the Frenchman; but she was at a loss to understand Sir Reginald's intimate association with a man who was at once poor and obscure.
She told Sir Reginald as much the next time she saw him alone.
"I know that in most of your friendships convenience and self-interest reign paramount over what you call sentimentality; and yet you choose for your friend this Carrington, whom no one knows; and who is, you tell me, even poorer than yourself. You must have a hidden motive, Reginald; and a strong one."
A dark shade passed over the face of the baronet.
"I have my reasons," he said. "Victor Carrington was once useful to me—at least he endeavoured to be so. If he failed, the obligation is none the less; and he is a man who will have his bond."
CHAPTER XVIII.
AT ANCHOR.
The current of life flowed on at River View Cottage without so much as a ripple in the shape of an event, after the appalling midnight visit of Miser Screwton's ghost, until one summer evening, when Captain Duncombe came home in very high spirits, bringing with him an old friend, of whom Miss Duncombe had heard her father talk very often; but whom she had hitherto never seen.