These circumstances, with all her audacity and advantages, she was unable to control. Her brilliant beauty, her clever tongue, her ostentatious dress and display were as nothing against the united disposition of a score of other women to make her understand that they neither desired her friendship nor felt her influence; and she had at least the sense to retire from a conflict "whose weapons," she said contemptuously, "were not in her armory." This condition of affairs naturally threw her very much upon the Athelings for society. While the Duchess sat with a few old ladies of her own caste and political persuasion, talking fearfully of the state of English society and of the horrors Reform would inaugurate for the nobility, Annabel spent her time with Mrs. and Miss Atheling, and learned to look hopefully into a future in which, perhaps, there would be neither dukes nor lords. Besides, Cecil North had a habit of visiting the Athelings also; and, without expressed arrangement, both Cecil and Annabel looked forward to those charming lunches which Mrs. Atheling dispensed with so little ceremony and so much good nature. It had been Cecil's intention to go with Edgar into the country; but when the hour for departure arrived, he had not been able to leave Annabel's vicinity, and, in some of those mysterious ways known to Love, she understood, and was pleased with this evidence of her power. Cecil's mother had been particularly prominent in that social ostracism the Reform ladies had meted out to her; and it gave to the real liking which she had for Cecil a piquant relish to parade the young man as her devoted servant in all places where his noble mother would be likely to see or hear tell of her son's "infatuation." But Cecil North's affection, and the favour it received, did not much influence Kate. With the perversity of a woman in love, she believed Annabel to be only amusing herself during Lord Exham's absence; and she accepted, without a doubt, all the little innuendoes, and half-truths, and half-admissions which Annabel suffered herself, as it were, without intent, to make.