A slight smile went over Cosmo’s face as he put down this note. It was not a very comfortable smile. A man does not like even an imaginary tone of contempt in another man’s voice. And Charley Ashley was his own retainer, his dog, so to speak. To be judged by him was a novel and not a pleasant sensation. A year ago Cosmo could have felt certain that Charley would find everything he did right; he would have believed in his friend’s inscrutable motives, even if he could not understand them. But now there was a change. It was not only the hopeless rivalry which Charley himself felt to be hopeless, and which had never stood for a moment in Cosmo’s way, but it was the instinct of true affection in the good fellow’s heart which made a severe critic, a judge incorruptible, of Charley. Douglas did not think very much of Charley’s opinion or approval; but to feel it withdrawn from him, to detect a doubt, and even suspicion in his faithful adherent’s words, gave him a sting. Then he read the long letter in which Anne had poured forth all her heart; there were revelations in it also. It had been interrupted by Rose’s matter-of-fact questions. Darts of vulgar misapprehension, of commonplace incapacity to understand those fine motives of Cosmo’s which to herself were so eloquent, had come across the current of her words. Anne had not been aware of the risings and fallings of sentiment with which she wrote. She had known that by turns her heart in her bosom felt, as she had herself described it, ‘like lead.’ She had been aware that now and then there had seemed no sort of comfort nor lightening of the sky wherever she looked, even when she looked to him, and endeavoured to think of that ‘falling back upon’ him to support her, which had seemed the happiest image of their mutual relations a few days ago. But she had not been aware of the breaks in her letter, following these fluctuations of sentiment, of how she had flagged and shown her discouragement, and sometimes permitted to be audible a breathing, not of complaint, not of reproach, but of something which was neither, yet included both--a sort of sigh of loneliness.