She looked radiantly lovely. The vestiges of the years intervening between childhood and womanhood that had chiefly been seamed by struggles to attain emotions such as came readily to other girls, and which she felt should, by duty, if not inclination, come to her, had vanished. Mrs. Hennifer, who alone knew what those struggles had been, and had marvelled at the simple and innocent earnestness with which she had striven to be like other girls, and to accept love and marriage as a matter of course, was alone able to realise the change in her. Before Cynthia went abroad it had become her opinion that she would not marry. She was convinced that she was more under the influence of Anthony Tremenheere than she knew, and also that he had now no hopes of winning her. She had looked jaded and perplexed sometimes, as though she understood neither others nor herself, but her general expression had been one of calm, amounting almost to exaltation. Without assuming any habits of unusual goodness, her air, manner, and actions had expressed a spirituality which was subtly diffusive, and seemed to rarify the moral atmosphere round her. Had she been a Roman Catholic, Mrs. Hennifer thought she would have found her vocation in a convent; but for her love of home and passionate attachment to old associations and familiar faces, and her strong sense of hereditary obligations as heiress and landowner, she might have become the brightest and blithest member of a Sisterhood. The groove of routine, the method of loving ministry uncharged by the responsibility of personal fervour, these seemed best adapted to her. Mrs. Hennifer ceased to imagine that any enthusiasm of feeling was in store for her. She would bless Lafer with her presence all her life, succeeding to the estates and dispensing hospitality and bounty to rich and poor; she would be happy in her loneliness, and in a certain dreaminess that would underlie all her practical energy and clear judgment; she would never feel the need of guidance and reliance on a stronger personality than her own; she would never long for a child, though loving all those with whom she came in contact; she would pass into ripe age and die. Much the same as this would be Anthony Tremenheere's lot; the two lives that might have been one, running apart, in parallel lines, held so by the forces of decorum and conventionality which Cynthia had forged, and then had vaguely and distrustfully chafed against as part of the perplexity of a life which was surely meant to be lucent to its depths. And here she was a new creature, illumined by the stir of ardent emotions, yet shy in her sense of self-surrender and her hope of perfect joys.