countess-dowager's lucky star been in the ascendant as it had been this
season, for she contrived to fasten herself upon the young Lord
Hartledon, and secure a firm footing in his town-house. She called him
her nephew--"My nephew Hartledon;" but that was a little improvement upon
the actual relationship, for she and the late Lady Hartledon had been
cousins only. She invited herself for a week's sojourn in May, and had
never gone away again; and it was now August. She had come down with him,
_sans cérémonie_, to Hartledon; had told him (as a great favour) that she
would look after his house and guests during her stay, as his mother
would have done. Easy, careless, good-natured Hartledon acquiesced, and
took it all as a matter of course. To him she was ever all sweetness
and suavity.

None knew better on which side her bread was buttered than the
countess-dowager. She liked it buttered on both sides, and generally
contrived to get it.

She had come down to Hartledon House with one fixed determination--that
she did not quit it until the Lady Maude was its mistress. For a long
while Maude had been her sole hope. Her other daughters had married
according to their fancy--and what had come of it?--but Maude was
different. Maude had great beauty; and Maude, truth to say, was almost
as selfishly alive to her own interest as her mother. _She_ should marry
well, and so be in a position to shelter the poor, homeless, wandering
dowager. Had she chosen from the whole batch of peers, not one could have
been found more eligible than he whom fortune seemed to have turned up
for her purpose--Lord Hartledon; and before the countess-dowager had been
one week his guest in London she began her scheming.

Lady Maude was nothing loth. Young, beautiful, vain, selfish, she yet