'Check-mate; you played that last move carelessly, Marsden. Your knight turned traitor!' cried Richard. His handsome profile cut sharply against the lamplight, he looked cool, on the alert, while Hugh's broad face was puckered and wrinkled with anxiety. 'Please do not let me interrupt you!' exclaimed Ethel, hurriedly, 'you look all so comfortable. I only want to say good-night, every one,' with a wave of her slim hand as she spoke. Richard gave a start, and rose to his feet, as he regarded the queenly young creature with her pale cheeks and radiant dress. A sort of perfumy fragrance seemed to pervade him as she brushed lightly past him; something subtle seemed to steal away his faculties. Had he ever seen her look so beautiful? Ethel stopped and gave him one of her sad, kind smiles. 'You do not often come to see us now, Richard. I think my father misses you,' was all she said. 'I will come--yes--I will come to-morrow,' he stammered. 'I did not think--you would miss me,' he almost added, but he remembered himself in time. His face grew stern and set as he watched her in the lamplight, gliding from one to another with a soft word or two. Why was it her appearance oppressed him to-night? he thought. He had often seen her dressed so before, and had gloried in her loveliness; to-night it seemed incongruous, it chilled him--this glittering apparition in the midst of the family circle. She looked more like the probable bride of Sir Robert Ferrers than the wife of a poor curate, he told himself bitterly, as he watched her slow lissom movements, the wavy undulating grace that was Ethel's chief charm, and yet as he thought it he knew he wronged her. For the man she could love, Ethel would pull off all her glistening gewgaws, put away from her all the accessories that wealth could give her. Delighting in luxury, revelling in it, it was in her to renounce it all without a sigh. Richard knew this, and paid her nobleness its just tribute even while he chafed in his own moodiness. She would do all this, and more than this, for the man she loved; but could she, would she, ever be brought to do it for him? When alone again with Mildred, Ethel threw her arms round her friend. 'Oh, Mildred! it seems worse than ever.' 'My poor dear.' 'Night after night he sits opposite to me, and we do not speak, except to exchange commonplaces, and then he carps at every deviation of opinion.' 'I know how dreadful it must be.' 'And then to be brought into the midst of a scene like that,' pointing to the door they had just closed; 'to see those happy faces and to hear all that innocent mirth,' as at that moment Polly's girlish laughter was distinctly audible, with Hugh's pealing 'Ha, ha' following it; 'and then to remember the room I have just left.' 'Hush, try to forget it, or the Sigourneys will wonder at your pale face.'