The dinner was cheerful to riotousness. Everybody had something to say; anecdotes were told, and laughter was frequent and loud. The St. Aubyn girls, who had deliberately snubbed the sisters Vandeleur, were not above conversing with the brother, and, finding him a kindred spirit in horseyness and doggyness, took him at once into their confidence, and were on the friendliest terms before dinner was finished. De Cazalet sat next his hostess, and talked exclusively to her. Mr. FitzJesse had Miss Bridgeman on his left hand, and conversed with her in gentle murmurs, save when in his quiet voice, and with his seeming-innocent smile, he told some irresistibly funny story--some touch of character seen with a philosophic eye--for the general joy of the whole table. Very different was the banquet of to-day from that quiet dinner on the first night of Mr. Hamleigh's visit to Mount Royal, that dinner at which Leonard watched his wife so intensely, eager to discover to what degree she was affected by the presence of her first lover. He watched her to-night, at the head of her brilliantly lighted dinner-table--no longer the old subdued light of low shaded lamps, but the radiance of innumerable candles in lofty silver candelabra, shining over a striking decoration of vivid crimson asters and spreading palm-leaves--he watched her helplessly, hopelessly, knowing that he and she were ever so much farther apart than they had been in the days before he brought Angus Hamleigh to Mount Royal, those miserable discontented days when he had fretted himself into a fever of jealousy and vague suspicion, and had thought to find a cure by bringing the man he feared and hated into his home, so that he might know for certain how deep the wrong was which this man's very existence seemed to inflict upon him. To bring those two who had loved and parted face to face, to watch and listen, to fathom the thoughts of each--that had been the process natural and congenial to his jealous temper; but the result had been an uncomfortable one. And now he saw his wife, whose heart he had tried to break--hating her because he had failed to make her love him--just as remote and unapproachable as of old. "What a fool I was to marry her," he thought, after replying somewhat at random to Mrs. St. Aubyn's last remark upon the superiority of Dorkings to Spaniards from a culinary point of view. "It was my determination to have my own way that wrecked me. I couldn't submit to be conquered by a girl--to have the wife I had set my heart upon when I was a boy, stolen from me by the first effeminate fopling my silly mother invited to Mount Royal. I had never imagined myself with any other woman for my wife--never really cared for any other woman."