"My manners and morals are not conspicuously loose, Cousin Arthur," Cicely said demurely; "but I don't belong to the smart set, and I don't even want to belong to it, and I expect that is what you meant by the fashionable throng. We live very quietly, Baba and I." "Quietly? In all this luxury, this pomp?" Sir Arthur glanced round the exquisite room with a shudder. "One of my designs in coming here to-day, was to ask whether you would ever care to come and pay us a visit at Burnbrooke, but we could offer you no such luxury as this. If, however, you would care to come, we have peace there." "It is very kind of you, and of Cousin Ellen to have thought of it," Cicely faltered with a recollection of a depressing fortnight spent in Sir Arthur's home, during her husband's lifetime; "perhaps in the spring or summer you would let us come and see you." "We have been away so frequently during the last three years that we have seen few people. My poor wife being a martyr to rheumatism, has had to visit foreign watering places; we have, as you know, been little at home, and we have invited few guests to Burnbrooke. If you will come, we shall be happy to see you; or if at any time you would care to send Veronica with her nurse, to breathe some other air than the pernicious air of this dark town, pray send them." Cicely made a courteous and smiling rejoinder, but Rupert thought he could read, in the mutinous setting of her pretty lips, that she had small intention of allowing her little daughter to breathe the salubrious air of Burnbrooke. "You are in town on business only, not for pleasure?" the little lady asked, taking a certain malicious delight in seeing Sir Arthur's start of horror. "Pleasure? I here for pleasure? Heaven forbid. I have come on troublesome business. I am anxious about the news of my unfortunate brother-in-law and his wife, my poor, foolish sister. Ah! well you never knew her, did you?" "No, never." Cicely shook her head, wildly trying to unearth from the depths of her mind, any fragments of knowledge she might ever have possessed about Sir Arthur's brother-in-law; but finding herself entirely at sea, gave up the attempt. "Poor, misguided soul," the visitor went on, with a solemn shake of the head; "she would never listen to reason; never believe what I told her. My sisters--Ah! well, well, I must not trouble you with our family skeletons. I have come up to try and find out if I can where my brother-in-law is, and to avert worse scandals than already exist." Cicely, still completely at sea as to the drift of his conversation, murmured something non-committal and sympathetic, and he continued speaking with unabated energy.