Maude Tredethlyn sat alone in her spacious chamber: oh, so spacious, so splendid, so dreary, so ghastly, with a tall carved walnut-wood bedstead that was like one of the tombs in Père la Chaise, only not so lively, and with long panels of looking-glass shimmering ghost-like in dark walnut-wood wardrobes and armoires, and _duchesse_ dressing-tables. She might have endured her troubles better, perhaps, if her room had been furnished with white and gold rather than so much funereal walnut-wood and ghastly looking-glass. She sat alone, thinking of the husband whom she had lost, and whose worth she had only discovered when it was too late. She would accept sympathy from no one. Julia wrote her letters, and saw people who must be seen, and was very good; but the wayward heart shrank away from her in its sudden desolation. She had loved him--she had loved him--and had been ashamed to confess her real feelings either to herself or to the people who had smiled upon a mercenary marriage as if it was the most natural thing under heaven; but who would have lifted their eyebrows in scornful surprise had they known that she could care for a person whose boyhood had been spent in a humble old homestead among the Cornish moorlands. Gliding gracefully through her frivolous life, tolerably happy in a shallow kind of way, with more shopping, and driving, and riding, and calling, and kettle-drumming, and dinner-giving, and horticultural-fête attending, always to be done than it was in the power of any one woman to do, except by a perpetual scramble, she had found no time to consider her position, no time to be aware how entirely even her most frivolous pleasures depended on the faithful minister whom no influence could entirely divide from her. Amongst the papers she had looked over on the library shelves and tables, where the dust lay thick, she had sometimes found a sheet of perfumed note-paper, and a list of items in her own writing--commissions she had given Francis to execute, troublesome ones sometimes, involving loss of time, and patient inquiry amongst West-end emporiums--orders for new books, drawing materials, ferns, music, all the frivolities of her life. She remembered with a cruel pang of remorse how faithfully the smallest details had been remembered, how patiently the most tiresome researches had been conducted, and how very lightly all this untiring service had been accepted. Circumstances which she had been too thoughtless to notice at the time flashed back upon her now, and she remembered how Harcourt Lowther had stepped between her and her husband even in this commonplace communion--how Francis had been pushed aside, politely taught to remember what an ignorant and awkward creature he was when compared to the fine gentleman.