In the afternoon of the day following that on which Sir Reginald paid a visit to Victor Carrington, the latter gentleman presented himself at the door of Hilton House. The frost had again set in, and this time with more than usual severity. There had been a heavy fall of snow, and the park-like grounds surrounding Madame Durski’s abode had an almost fairy-like appearance, the tracery of the leafless trees defined by the snow that had lodged on every branch, the undulating lawn one bed of pure white.

He knocked at the door and waited. The woman at the lodge had told him that it was very unlikely he would be able to see Madame Durski at this hour of the day, but he had walked on to the house notwithstanding.

It was already nearly four o’clock in the afternoon; but at that hour Paulina had rarely left her own apartments.

Victor Carrington knew this quite as well as the woman at the lodge, but he had business to do with another person as well as Paulina Durski. That other person was the widow’s humble companion.

The door was opened by Carlo Toas, Paulina’s confidential courier and butler. This man looked very suspiciously at the visitor.

“My mistress receives no one at this hour,” he said.

“I am aware that she does not usually see visitors so early,” replied Carrington; “but as I come on particular business, and as I come a long way to see her, she will perhaps make an exception in my favour.”

He produced his card-case as he spoke, and handed the man a card, on which he had written the following words in pencil:

“Pray see me, dear madame. I come on really important business, which will bear no delay. If you cannot see me till your dinner-hour, I will wait.”

The Spaniard ushered Victor into one of the reception-rooms, which looked cold and chill in the winter daylight. Except the grand piano, there was no trace of feminine occupation in the room. It looked like an apartment kept only for the reception of visitors — an apartment which lacked all the warmth and comfort of home.

Victor waited for some time, and began to think his message had not been taken to the mistress of the house, when the door was opened, and Miss Brewer appeared.

She looked at the visitor with an inquisitive glance as she entered the room, and approached him softly, with her light, greenish-grey eyes fixed upon his face.

“Madame Durski has been suffering from nervous headache all day,” she said, “and has not yet risen. Her dinner-hour is half-past six. If your business is really of importance, and if you care to wait, she will be happy to see you then.”

“My business is of real importance; and I shall be very glad to wait,” answered Victor. “Since Madame Durski is, unhappily, unable to receive me for some time, I shall gladly avail myself of the opportunity, in order to enjoy a little conversation with you, Miss Brewer,” he said, courteously, “always supposing that you are not otherwise engaged.”

“I have no other engagement whatever,” answered the lady, in a cold, measured voice.

“I wish to speak to you upon very serious business,” continued Victor, “and I believe that I can venture to address you with perfect candour. The business to which I allude concerns the interests of Madame Durski, and I have every reason to suppose that you are thoroughly devoted to her interests.”

“For whom else should I care?” returned Miss Brewer, with a bitter laugh. “Madame Durski is the only friend I can count in this world. I have known her from her childhood — and if I can believe anything good of my species, which is not very easy for me to do, I can believe that she cares for me — a little — as she might care for some piece of furniture which she had been accustomed to see about her from her infancy, and which she would miss if it were removed.”

“You wrong your friend,” said Victor. “She has every reason to be sincerely attached to you, and I have little doubt that she is so.”

“What right have you to have little doubt or much doubt about it?” exclaimed Miss Brewer, contemptuously; “and why do you try to palm off upon me the idle nonsense which senseless people consider it incumbent on them to utter? You do not know Paulina Durski — I do. She is a woman who never in her life cared for more than two things.”

“And these two things are —”

“The excitement of the gaming-table, and the love of your worthless friend, Sir Reginald Eversleigh.”

“Does she really love my friend?”

“She does. She loves him as few men deserve to be loved — and least of all that man. She loves him, although she knows that her affection is unreturned, unappreciated. For his sake she would sacrifice her own happiness, her own prosperity. Women are foolish creatures, Mr. Carrington, and you men do wisely when you despise them.”

“I will not enter into the question of my friend’s merits,” said Victor; “but I know that Madame Durski has won the love of a man who is worthy of any woman’s affection — a man who is rich, and can elevate her from her present — doubtful — position.”

The Frenchman uttered these last words with a great appearance of restraint and hesitation.

“Say, miserable position,” exclaimed Miss Brewer; “for Paulina Durski’s position is the most degraded that a woman — whose life has been comparatively sinless — ever occupied.”

“And every day its degradation will become more profound,” said Victor. “Unless Madame Durski follows my advice, she cannot long remain in England. In her native city she has little to hope for. In Paris, her name has acquired an evil odour. What, then, lies before her?”

“Ruin!” exclaimed Miss Brewer, abruptly; “starvation it may be. I know that our race is nearly run, Mr. Carrington. You need not trouble yourself to remind me of our misery.”

“If I do remind you of it, I only do so in the hope that I may be able to serve you,” answered Victor. “I have tasted all the bitterness of poverty, Miss Brewer. Forgive me, if I ask whether you, too, have been acquainted with its sting?”

“Have I felt its sting?” cried the poor faded creature. “Who has felt the tooth of the serpent, Poverty, more cruelly than I? It has pierced my very heart. From my childhood I have known nothing but poverty. Shall I tell you my story, Mr. Carrington? I am not apt to speak of myself, or of my youth; but you have evoked the demon, Memory, and I feel a kind of relief in speaking of that long-departed time.”

“I am deeply interested in all you say, Miss Brewer. Stranger though I am, believe me that my interest is sincere.”

As Victor Carrington said this, Charlotte Brewer looked at him with a sharp, penetrating glance. She was not a woman to be fooled by shallow hypocrisies. The light of the winter’s day was fading; but even in the fading light Victor saw the look of sharp suspicion in her pinched face.

“Why should you be interested in me?” she asked, abruptly.

“Because I believe you may be useful to me,” answered Victor, boldly. “I do not want to deceive you, Miss Brewer. Great triumphs have been achieved by the union of two powerful minds.”

I know you to possess a powerful mind; I know you to be a woman above ordinary prejudices; and I want you to help me, as I am ready to help you. But you were about to tell me the story of your youth.

“It shall be told briefly,” said Miss Brewer, speaking in a rapid, energetic manner that was the very reverse of the measured tones she was wont to use. “I am the daughter of a disgraced man, who was a gentleman once; but I have forgotten that time, as he forgot it long before he died.

“My father passed the last ten years of his life in a prison. He died in that prison, and within those dingy smoke-blackened walls my childhood was spent — a joyless childhood, without a hope, without a dream, haunted perpetually by the dark phantom, Poverty. I emerged from that prison to enter a new one, in the shape of a West-end boarding~school, where I became the drudge and scape-goat of rich citizens’ daughters, heiresses presumptive to the scrapings of tallow-chandlers and coal-merchants, linen-drapers and cheesemongers. For six years I endured my fate patiently, uncomplainingly. Not one creature amongst that large household loved me, or cared for me, or thought whether I was happy or miserable.

“I worked like a slave. I rose early, and went to bed late, giving my youth, my health, my beauty — you will smile, perhaps, Mr. Carrington, but in those days I was accounted a handsome woman — in exchange for what? My daily bread, and the education which was to enable me to earn a livelihood hereafter. Some distant relations undertook to clothe me; and I was dressed in those days about as shabbily as I have been dressed ever since. In all my life, I never knew the innocent pleasure which every woman feels in the possession of handsome clothes.

“At eighteen, I left the boarding-school to go on the Continent, where I was to fill a situation which had been procured for me. That situation was in the household of Paulina Durski’s father. Paulina was ten years of age, and I was appointed as her governess and companion. From that day to this, I have never left her. As much as I am capable of loving any one, I love her. But my mind has been embittered by the miseries of my girlhood, and I do not pretend to be capable of much womanly feeling.”

“I thank you for your candour,” said Victor. “It is of importance for me to understand your position, for, by so doing, I shall be the better able to assist you. I may believe, then, that there is only one person in the world for whom you care, and that person is Paulina Durski?”

“You may believe that.”

“And I may also believe that you, who have drained to the dregs the bitter cup of poverty, would do much, and risk much, in order to be rich?”

“You may.”

“Then, Miss Brewer, let me speak to you openly, as one sincerely interested in you, and desirous of serving you and your charming but infatuated friend. May I hope that we shall be uninterrupted for some time longer, for I am anxious to explain myself at once, and fully, now that the opportunity has arisen?”

“No one is likely to enter this room, unless summoned by me,” said Miss Brewer. “You may speak freely, and at any length you please, Mr. Carrington; but I warn you, you are speaking to a person who has no faith in any profession of disinterested regard.”

As she spoke, Miss Brewer leaned back in her chair, folded her hands before her, and assumed an utterly impassible expression of countenance. No less promising recipient of a confidential scheme could have been seen: but Victor Carrington was not in the least discouraged. He replied, in a cheerful, deferential, and yet business-like tone:

“I am quite aware of that, Miss Brewer; and for my part, I should not feel the respect I do feel for you if I believed you so deficient in sense and experience as to take any other view. I don’t offer myself to you in the absurd disguise of a preux chevalier, anxious to espouse the unprofitable cause of two unprotected women in an equivocal position, and in circumstances rapidly tending to desperation.”

Here Victor Carrington glanced at his companion; he wanted to see if the shot had told. But Miss Brewer cared no more for the almost open insult, than she had cared for the implied interest conveyed in the exordium of his discourse. She sat silent and motionless. He continued:

“I have an object to gain, which I am resolved to achieve. Two ways to the attainment of this object are open to me; the one injurious, in fact destructive, to you and Madame Durski, the other eminently beneficial. I am interested in you. I particularly like Madame Durski, though I am not one of the legion of her professed admirers.”

Miss Brewer shook her head sadly. That legion was much reduced in its numbers of late.

“Therefore,” continued Carrington, without seeming to observe the gesture, “I prefer to adopt the latter course, and further your interests in securing my own. I suppose you can at least understand and credit such very plain motives, so very plainly expressed, Miss Brewer?”

“Yes,” she said, “that may be true; it does not seem unlikely; we shall see.”

“You certainly shall. My explanation will not, I hope, be unduly tedious, but it is indispensable that it should be full. You know, Miss Brewer, that Sir Reginald Eversleigh and I are intimate friends?”

Miss Brewer smiled — a pale, prolonged, unpleasant smile, and then replied, speaking very deliberately:

“I know nothing of the kind, Mr. Carrington. I know you are much together, and have an air of familiar acquaintance, which is the true interpretation of friendship, I take it, between men of the world — of your world in particular.”

The hard and determined expression of her manner would have discouraged and deterred most men. It did not discourage or deter Victor Carrington.

“Put what interpretation you please upon my words,” he said, “but recognize the facts. There is a strict alliance, if you prefer that phrase, between me and Sir Reginald Eversleigh, and his present intimacy, with his seeming devotion to Madame Durski, prevents him from carrying out the terms of that alliance to my satisfaction. I am therefore resolved to break off that intimacy. Do you comprehend me so far?”

“Yes, I comprehend you so far,” answered Miss Brewer, “perfectly.”

“Considering Madame Durski’s feelings for Sir Reginald — feelings of which, I assure you, I consider him, even according to my own unpretending standard, entirely unworthy — this intimacy cannot be broken off without pain to her, but it might be destroyed without any profit, nay, with ruinous loss. Now, I cannot spare her the pain; that is necessary, indispensable, both for her good, and — which I don’t pretend not to regard more urgently — my own. But I can make the pain eminently profitable to her, with your assistance — in fact, so profitable as to secure the peace and prosperity of her whole future life.”

He paused, and Miss Brewer looked steadily at him, but she did not speak.

“Reginald Eversleigh owes me money, Miss Brewer, and I cannot afford to allow him to remain in my debt. I don’t mean that he has borrowed money from me, for I never had any to lend, and, having any, should never have lent it.” He saw how the tone he was taking suited the woman’s perverted mind, and pursued it. “But I have done him certain services for which he undertook to pay me money, and I want money. He has none, and the only means by which he can procure it is a rich marriage. Such a marriage is within his reach; one of the richest heiresses in London would have him for the asking — she is an ironmonger’s daughter, and pines to be My Lady — but he hesitates, and loses his time in visits to Madame Durski, which are only doing them both harm. Doing her harm, because they are deceiving her, encouraging a delusion; and doing him harm, because they are wasting his time, and incurring the risk of his being ‘blown upon’ to the ironmonger. Vulgar people of the kind, you know, my dear Miss Brewer, give ugly names, and attach undue importance to intimacies of this kind, and — and — in short, it is on the cards that Madame Durski may spoil Sir Reginald’s game. Well, as that game is also mine, you will find no difficulty in understanding that I do not intend Madame Durski shall spoil it.”

“Yes, I understand that,” said Miss Brewer, as plainly as before; “but I don’t understand how Paulina is to be served in the affair, and I don’t understand what my part is to be in it.”

“I am coming to that,” he said. “You cannot be unaware of the impression which Madame Durski has made upon Sir Reginald’s cousin, Douglas Dale.”

“I know he did admire her,” said Miss Brewer, “but he has not been here since his brother’s death. He is a rich man now.”

“Yes, he is — but that will make no change in him in certain respects. Douglas Dale is a fool, and will always remain so. Madame Durski has completely captivated him, and I am perfectly certain he would marry her to-morrow, if she could be brought t............