"Now, Maude, no heroics. I'll not see you make a fool of yourself as your sisters have done. He's not Val Elster any longer; he is Lord Hartledon: better-looking than ever his brother was, and will make a better husband, for he'll be more easily led."
"I would not marry Val for the whole world," she said, with strong emotion. "I dislike him; I hate him; I never could be a wife to Val Elster."
"We'll see," said the dowager, pushing up her front, of which she had just caught sight in a glass.
"Thank Heaven, there's no fear of it!" resumed Maude, collecting her senses, and sitting down again with a relieved sigh; "he is to marry Anne Ashton. Thank Heaven that he loves her!"
"Anne Ashton!" scornfully returned the countess-dowager. "She might have been tolerated when he was Val Elster, not now he is Lord Hartledon. What notions you have, Maude!"
Maude burst into tears. "Mamma, I think it is fearfully indecent for you to begin upon these things already! It only happened last night, and—and it sounds quite horrible."
"When one has to live as I do, one has to do many things decent and indecent," retorted the countess-dowager sharply. "He has had his hint, and you've got yours: and you are no true girl if you suffer yourself now to be triumphed over by Anne Ashton."
Maude cried on silently, thinking how cruel fate was to have taken one brother and spared the other. Who—save Anne Ashton—would have missed Val Elster; while Lord Hartledon—at least he had made the life of one heart. A poor bruised heart now; never, never to be made quite whole again.
Thus the dowager, in her blindness, began her plans. In her blindness! If we could only foresee the ending of some of the unholy schemes that many of us are apt to weave, we might be more willing to leave them humbly in a higher Hand than ours. Do they ever bring forth good, these plans, born of our evil passions—hatred, malice, utter selfishness? I think not. They may seem to succeed triumphantly, but—watch the triumph to the end.