divide them. There, in that Gallery, she had sat, with rage and defeat in
her heart, watching him pass along, behind the Speaker's chair, toward the
wrong division lobby, his head doggedly held down, as though he knew and
felt her eyes upon him, but must do his duty all the same. On this one
matter he had voted against her, spoken against her, openly flouted and
disavowed her. And it had broken down their whole relation, poisoned
their whole life. "Women are natural tyrants," he had said to her once,
bitterly--"no man could torment me as you do." And then had come his
death--his swift last illness, with those tired eyes still alive in the
dumb face, after speech and movement were no longer possible--eyes which
were apt to close when she came near.

And yet, after all--the will!--the will which all his relations and friends
had taken as the final expression of his life's weakness, his miserable
failure to play the man in his own household, and in which _she_, his
wife, had recognized with a secret triumph his last effort to propitiate
her, his last surrender to her. Everything left to her, both land and
personalty, everything! save for a thousand a year to each of the children,
and fifteen hundred a year to Coryston, his heir. The great Irish, the
great Devonshire properties, the accumulated savings of a lifetime, they
were all hers--hers absolutely. Her husband had stood last in the entail;
and with a view to her own power, she had never allowed him to renew it.

Coryston had been furiously angry when the terms of his father's will were
revealed. She could never think without shivering of certain scenes, with
Coryston in the past--of a certain other scene that was still to come.
Well, it had been a duel between them; and after apparently sore defeat,
she had won, so far as influence over his father was concerned. And since
his father's death she had given him every chance. He had only to hold his
tongue, to keep his monstrous, _sans-culotte_ opinions to himself, at