Roma was far from happy at this juncture. A painful consciousness was beginning to grow upon her that her relations with Gertrude were not what they had been; for the first time in the several years they had lived together she felt that she was not altogether in her sister-in-law's confidence; worse than this, that she was no longer thoroughly trusted. And she was at no loss to whose influence to attribute this mortifying change. Scrupulously careful as she was in the regulation of her manner to Beauchamp, that it should not be by a shade more or less familiar than was natural to their acknowledged position of brotherly and sisterly intimacy--indifferent, distant even, as it was now apparently Captain Chancellor's _role_ to appear to her-- Roma yet saw clearly that Adelaide's mother, with her sharp worldly eyes, her conventional suspicion of every unmarried woman not fortunate enough to be an heiress, was on the scent of something below the surface between herself and the man Mrs Chancellor had picked out for her future son-in-law. "It is all Beauchamp's fault. It is very cruel of him to place me in such a position. I believe he wants these people to think that he dislikes me, and that I--oh, no, he could not be so horribly coarse," thought Roma, though she grew furious at the idea. "Why won't he believe simply that I only care for him as a brother, and let us be comfortable as we used to be? And why is Gertrude so weak as to be turned against me when I have told her so plainly how it is?" And there were times at which she almost wished that things would come to a crisis, and that she might have the opportunity she had hitherto on every account so carefully avoided of telling Captain Chancellor the plain truth; that to one woman in the world his fascinations were less than nothing. But at present things showed no signs of coming to any such crisis. Beauchamp comported himself to her with exaggerated and obtrusive indifference, and amused himself very comfortably with a handsome Miss Fretville, whose _fiance_ was safe in India, and (rather more discreetly) with pretty Lady Exyton, whose husband was sixty, and, so long as his dinner was to his taste, calmly tolerant of her ladyship's harmless little flirtations. Had the change been less sudden and obtrusive, Roma would have been only too glad to believe it genuine. As it was, she rightly attributed it to pique--a powerful motive in some natures, for wounded vanity has many of the symptoms and sensations of the genuine malady, often enough deceiving even the patient's self. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ End of Volume One. VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER ONE. EAVESDROPPING. _Rom_. The hurt cannot be much. _Mer_. No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but 'tis enough.