Osmond waited, and then, with a little formal air, ‘The children of others may be a great interest!’ he announced.

‘You’re more like a copy-book than I. There’s something after all that holds us together.’

‘Is it the idea of the harm I may do you?’ Osmond asked.

‘No; it’s the idea of the good I may do for you. It’s that,’ Madame Merle pursued, ‘that made me so jealous of Isabel. I want it to be my work,’ she added, with her face, which had grown hard and bitter, relaxing to its habit of smoothness.

Her friend took up his hat and his umbrella, and after giving the former article two or three strokes with his coat-cuff, ‘On the whole, I think,’ he said, ‘you had better leave it to me.’

After he had left her she went, the first thing, and lifted from the mantel-shelf the attenuated coffee- cup in which he had mentioned the existence of a crack; but she looked at it rather abstractedly. ‘Have I been so vile all for nothing?’ she vaguely wailed.