“Yes, but only for a fortnight, and we was to keep the apartments for her, which we did; and at the end of a fortnight she came back, dressed beautiful, and with all sorts of lovely things in her boxes, and she was looking so well and so happy, and anybody would have thought she was the luckiest woman in the world. But mother, she used to shake her head about it, and say she never knew those secret sort of marriages to come to any good, because when a gentleman begins by not wanting to own his wife, he’s very apt to end by wishing he hadn’t married her. But mother always looks at the black side of things, whether it’s taxes, or whether it’s lodgers, or whatever it is; so I didn’t take much notice. Mrs. Lesley seemed very happy; and Mr. Lesley, for the first week or so, he stopped at home a great deal, and scarcely ever went out, except to take his wife out to dine, or to a theatre, or something of that kind; and they really seemed the happiest couple that ever was; but by-and-by Mr. Lesley went away,--to college, his wife told me; and I shall never forget how she cried, poor thing, the night he left her, and how lonely she looked sitting in this room, where they’d been so happy together, with their little oyster-suppers after the theatre, and everything that heart could wish. She’d got some books that he’d left behind him spread out before her on the table, and she was turning one of them over when I went in to see her. “‘They’re very hard to understand, Miss Banks,’ she said; ‘but I try to read them, because I want to be clever, and able to talk to Robert when he comes home.’ “After this she was almost always reading, poor little thing, and she’d sit in this room for days and days together; for she didn’t like to go out alone, and mother does drive and worry so, that it wasn’t often I could get out with her. Mr. Lesley was to be away three months, she told me; and I’m sure that poor thing used to count the hours and minutes almost, wishing the time to go: but when the three months was up, there was no Mr. Lesley; he was going fishing, somewhere in Wales, with some grand friends she told me, and wouldn’t be home till the next vacation. I never saw any one so cut up as she was by the disappointment, though she wouldn’t talk about it; only I could see every morning by her face, that she’d been lying awake half the night, crying her poor eyes out.” “Poor girl, poor girl!” murmured Francis Tredethlyn. This all-absorbing passion called love was a sorrowful thing, then, he thought, let it come to whom it would--a one-sided frenzy, a perpetual sacrifice, a self-imposed immolation. “Pray tell me all you can about my cousin,” he said to Miss Banks. “You cannot imagine how anxious I am to hear of her.”