"And when the man said that, my dear Philip, I assure you I felt as guilty as if I had done him some horrible wrong; he stood there with his head up, looking at me with his sad proud eyes--and they are beautiful!--till, positively, I could almost have cried--I could, indeed, for though I don't like him on principle, I couldn't help pitying him," said Lady Marabout, in a subsequent relation of the scene to her son. "Wasn't it a terrible position? I was as near as possible forgetting everything due to poor Rosediamond, and saying to him that I believed Cecil liked him and would never like anybody else, but, thank Heaven! I remembered myself, and checked myself in time. If it had been anybody but Chandos Cheveley, I should really have admired him, he spoke so nobly! When he lifted his hat and left me, though I _ought_ to have been glad (and I _was_ glad, of course) that Cecil would be free from the society of anybody so objectionable and so dangerous, I felt wretched for him--I did indeed. It _is_ so hard always to be placed in such miserable positions!" By which you will perceive that the triumphant crushing of Lady Marabout's Cobra didn't afford her the unmixed gratification she had anticipated. "I have done what was my duty to poor Rosediamond, and what General Ormsby's confidence merited," she solaced herself that day, feeling uncomfortably and causelessly guilty, she hardly knew why, when she saw Chandos Cheveley keeping sedulously with the "Amandine set," and read in Cecil's tell-tale face wonder, perplexity, and regret thereat, till the Frangipane fête came to an end. She had appeased the manes of the late Rosediamond, who, to her imagination, always appeared sitting up aloft keeping watch over the discharge of her chaperone's duties, but she had a secret and horrible dread that she had excited the wrath of Rosediamond's daughter. She had driven her Ogre off the scene, it is true, but she could not feel that she had altogether come off the best in the contest. Anne Hautton had congratulated her, indeed, on having "acted with decision _at last_," but then she had marred it all by asking if Carruthers was likely to be engaged to Cecil? And Lady Marabout had been forced to confess he was not; Philip, when pressed by her that very morning to be a little attentive to Cecil, having shaken his head and laughed: "She's a bewitching creature, mother, but she don't bewitch _me_! You know what Shakspeare says of wooing, wedding, and repentance. I've no fancy for the inseparable trio!" Altogether, Lady Marabout was far from peace and tranquillity, though the Cobra _was_ crushed, as she drove away from the Frangipane breakfast, and she was little nearer them when Cecil turned her eyes upon her with a question worse to Lady Marabout's ear than the roar of a Lancaster battery. "What have you said to him?" "My dear Cecil! What have I said to whom?" returned Lady Marabout, with Machiavellian surprise.