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an unyielding stare, smiled, and asked him some small question in her pretty English voice. The conversation was laborious, however. Pamela made one or two attempts to draw her aunt into it, but without success. There was evidently little love lost between her and her husband’s stepson; she never addressed a word to him, and seemed unwilling or unable to warm towards her niece. As for Power, he had not the vaguest idea of how to talk to a girl of Pamela’s stamp. He had only one method in his dealings with women; it had proved fairly successful with almost all the pretty girls in the neighbourhood, and he was quite incapable of understanding that it might not succeed with Pamela.

“Shy, she is,” he thought as she talked on about her trip, her eyes avoiding his; “and awfully young—unless that’s put on as part of her manner. But I don’t think so she’s like a bird, a wild bird that keeps very still, so that you won’t guess it’s scared. . . . The prettiest thing I’ve ever seen her little soft hands, and her blue eyes, and her white skin. And the sort of air about her. . . . I wonder———! No, I don’t wonder, for I’ve always taken what I wanted, and I shall go on that way. It pays far better, and it’s simpler. But I’m going to want far more of her than I’ve ever wanted yet—and I’ll get it too.”

His meditations concluded with an oath. He was a passionate man, but not a bad one, and neither cowardly nor mean. Only when he desired a thing he made straight for it in one unswerving course, and had no pity or scruples to spare for anything that might stand in his way. His business qualities were remarkable, and the flourishing state of the place was entirely due to him, and had been since he was the merest boy. Had matters been left to Uncle Markham’s ineffectual hands everything would have gone to pieces long ago, and his first wife’s money lost in the general chaos. But under Alick’s management affairs had always prospered. Hard,