At this time she had been for some painful months in possession of
a most important one--painful, I say, because all those months
she had discovered no possibility of making use of it. The trial
had been hard. Her one passion was to drive the dark horses of
society, and here she had been sitting week after week on the coach
box over the finest team she had ever handled, ramping and "foming
tarre," unable to give them their heads because the demon grooms
had disappeared and left the looped traces dangling from their
collars. She had followed Florimel from Portlossie--to Edinburgh,
and then to London, but not yet had seen how to approach her with
probable advantage. In the meantime she had renewed old relations
with a certain herb doctor in Kentish Town, at whose house she
was now accommodated. There she had already begun to entice the
confidences of maid servants, by use of what evil knowledge she
had, and pretence to more, giving herself out as a wise woman. Her
faith never failed her that, if she but kept handling the fowls of
circumstance, one or other of them must at length drop an egg of
opportunity in her lap. When she stumbled upon the schoolmaster,
preaching in a chapel near her own haunts, she felt something more
like a gust of gratitude to the dark power that sat behind and
pulled the strings of events--for thus she saw through her own
projected phantom the heart of the universe--than she had ever
yet experienced.
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