Maude was very gratefully and affectionately disposed towards her father’s benefactor; but she grew terribly tired of his sole companionship during that rainy six weeks in the quiet Devonian watering-place. If the bride and bridegroom had gone on that stereotyped foreign tour so strongly protested against by Harcourt Lowther, Maude’s sunny nature would speedily have asserted itself. She would have found in the rapid changes of scene, in all the pleasant excitement of quick travelling, plenty of subject-matter for conversation with her new companion; there would have been always some common ground on which they could have met, some little incident, among the hundred incidents of a traveller’s day, which would have aroused a sympathy between them. But thrown on their own resources at Combe Western, a Horace Walpole and a Madame du Deffand might have exhausted their conversational powers, and yawned drearily in each other’s faces. Maude found herself wishing for the end of her honeymoon before the first week had drawn to its close; and Francis, always timidly watchful of his wife’s beautiful face, felt a chill anguish at his heart as he perceived her weariness of spirit. Thus it was that, when they returned to London, the husband and wife were little nearer to each other than on their wedding-day. No pleasant familiarity with each other’s thoughts and feelings had arisen during that dull residence in a dull watering-place. That subtle process of assimilation by which--except in some dismal examples--husband and wife grow like each other in mind and feeling, had not yet begun. They were strangers still; in spite of Maude’s esteem for her husband’s character, in spite of Francis Tredethlyn’s blind idolatry of his wife’s perfections; and Harcourt Lowther, who was one of the guests at their first dinner-party, was not slow to recognize the state of the case. “You’ll get on admirably together by-and-by, dear boy,” he said to Francis, as they smoked their cigars together in a luxurious little study behind the big library, some days after the great dinner. “You’ll get on superbly with your lovely wife, if you only play your cards cleverly. There must be no Darby and Joan business, you know--no sentimentalism. Lionel Hillary’s daughter is just the woman to be disgusted by that sort of thing. It was all very well, of course, to do the romantic during the honeymoon; but that’s all over now; your wife will go her way, and you’ll go yours. Her friends will absorb a great deal of her time and attention; your friends will absorb you. You’ll have your club, your horses, your men’s parties, and perhaps the House,--for you ought decidedly to get into Parliament,--and it will be utterly impossible for you to spend all your mornings hanging about your wife’s rooms, or nursing her Skye terriers, as you seem to have done hitherto.”