Had he known, Lucienne’s heartache was at once a simple and a complex suffering. It was simple, even commonplace, in that it arose from the fact that she was in love with a man whom she could not marry. But it was complicated by several other anguishes, such as the knowledge that she was deceiving the betrothed whom, had there not been that other, she fancied she could have loved so well, whom as it was she trusted and admired, and with whom, after his return from Brittany, she kept up a regular correspondence. Then there was the constant companionship with his mother, to whom also she was obliged to show a deceitful bearing, and who would always be talking of him, especially during that time of anxiety when they knew him to be in danger in Brittany. Last and sharpest of all, there was the wild, agonising regret and shame for her own conduct in that scene of farewell with Louis, for having at that supreme moment irretrievably cheapened herself in his eyes, so that, in all probability, she had slain his love for her—a passion which she had not enough altruism to wish dead. For Lucienne had gradually been building her lover a pedestal, whose base was his withstanding of her pleading in that hour. Since Saint Lucian’s Day their parts had been reversed, and it was Louis, not she, who stood for honour now. What must he have thought of her even at the time . . . and afterwards! So she tortured herself into thinking the absence of any letter or message from him a proof that he no longer cared for her—forgetting that the elevated rôle she had assigned him would have precluded him from writing in any case. And the more she exalted him and conceived him now cold to her, the more did her passion increase, so that he was always the one stable thought in her mind, the one figure always before her eyes—except when the presence of strangers distracted her. And the thought of Louis, barbed with this humiliating remorse, having become a veritable torture to her, she ended by craving for this distraction and welcoming it, when it came, with all her heart. Meanwhile Christmas approached, with its promise of festivities, and the neighbourhood was not more astonished than was Miss Trenchard when Mr Harry Trenchard announced his intention of giving a ball on Christmas Eve. A bachelor, he had never before thus entered the lists. Miss Trenchard was not exactly displeased; the embers of ancient gaiety still smouldered in her respectable breast, and she thought it not unbecoming that Henry should exhibit the resources of his mansion to the public. But all her questions, discreet or indiscreet, failed to wrest from her nephew the motive of his sudden outburst of hospitality. At Ashley Court that motive was guessed at, though not formulated in speech.