"If I had seen her married to a man I could respect; if I could know that she was completely happy; that the life before her were secure from all pain and evil, I should have nothing to regret," he told himself; but the thought of Leonard's coarse nature was a perpetual grief. "When I am lying in the long peaceful sleep, she will be miserable with that man," he thought. One day when Jessie and he were alone together, he spoke freely of Leonard. "I don't want to malign a man who has treated me with exceptional kindness and cordiality," he said, "above all a man whose mother I once loved, and always respected--yes, although she was hard and cruel to me--but I cannot help wishing that Christabel's husband had a more sympathetic nature. Now that my own future is reduced to a very short span I find myself given to forecasting the future of those I----love--and it grieves me to think of Christabel in the years to come--linked with a man who has no power to appreciate or understand her--tied to the mill-wheel of domestic duty." "Yes, it is a hard case," answered Jessie, bitterly, "one of those hard cases that so often come out of people acting for the best, as they call it. No doubt Mrs. Tregonell thought she acted for the best with regard to you and Christabel. She did not know how much selfishness--a selfish idolatry of her own cub--was at the bottom of her over-righteousness. She was a good woman--generous, benevolent--a true friend to me--yet there are times when I feel angry with her--even in her grave--for her treatment of you and Christabel. Yet she died happy in the belief in her own wisdom. She thought Christabel's marriage with Leonard ought to mean bliss for both. Because she adored her Cornish gladiator, forsooth, she must needs think every body else ought to doat upon him." "You don't seem warmly attached to Mr. Tregonell," said Angus. "I am not--and he knows that I am not. I never liked him, and he never liked me, and neither of us have ever pretended to like each other. We are quits, I assure you. Perhaps you think it rather horrid of me to live in a man's house--eat his bread and drink his wine--one glass of claret every day at dinner--and dislike him openly all the time. But I am here because Christabel is here--just as I would be with her in the dominions of Orcus. She is--well--almost the only creature I love in this world, and it would take a good deal more than my dislike of her husband to part us. If she had married a galley-slave I would have taken my turn at the oar." "You are as true as steel," said Angus; "and I am glad to think Christabel has such a friend." To all the rest of the world he spoke of her as Mrs. Tregonell, nor did he ever address her by any other name. But to Jessie Bridgeman, who had been with them in the halcyon days of their love-making, she was still Christabel. To Jessie, and to none other, could he speak of her with perfect freedom. CHAPTER XI. "WHO KNOWS NOT CIRCE?"