It was intolerable, unbearable, but it was true--it was true; and in the very keenest paroxysm of her shame she would confess that she would do all that she had done, would conspire with even a baser one than Jasper Adelstone to gain her end. "She!" she would murmur in the still watches of the night--"she to marry the man to whom I have given my love! It is impossible--it shall not be! Though I have to move heaven and earth, it shall not be." And then, after a sleepless night, she would come down to breakfast--fair, and sweet, and smiling--a little pale, perhaps, but looking all the lovelier for such paleness, without the shadow of a care in the deep violet eyes. Toward Leycester her bearing was simply perfection. She did not wish to alarm him; she knew that a hint of what she felt would put him on his guard, and she held herself in severe restraint. Her manner to him was simply what it was to anyone else--exquisitely refined and charming. If anything, she adopted a lighter tone, and sought to and succeeded in calling forth his rare laughter. She deceived him completely. "Lenore in love with me!" he said to himself more than once; "the idea is ridiculous! What could have made the mother imagine such a thing?" And so they met freely and frankly, and he talked and laughed with her at his ease, little dreaming that she was watching him as a cat watches a mouse, and that not a thing he said or did escaped her. She knew by instinct where he spent the times in which he was missing from the Hall, and pictured to herself the meetings between him and the girl who had robbed her of his love. And as the jealousy increased, so did the love which created it. Day by day she realized still more fully that he had won her heart--that it was gone to him forever--that her whole future happiness depended upon him. The very tone of his voice, so deep and musical--his rare laugh--the smile that made his face so gay and bright--yes, even the bursts of the passionate temper which lit up the dark eyes with sudden fire, were precious to her. "Yes, I love him," she murmured to herself--"it is all summed up in that. I love him." And Leycester, still smiling to himself over his mother's "amusing mistake," was all unsuspecting. All his thoughts were of Stella. Now as he came toward the terrace, she stood with Lady Longford and Lord Charles looking down at him. She watched him, her cheek resting on her white hand, her face hidden from the rest by the sunshade, whose lining of hearty blue harmonized with the golden hair, and "her heart hungered," as Victor Hugo says. "Here's Leycester," said Lord Charles. Lady Longford looked over the balustrade. "What has he been doing? Rowing--fishing?" "He went out with a fishing rod," said Lord Charles, with a grin, "but the fish appear to have devoured it; at any rate Leycester hasn't got it now. Hullo, old man, where have you been? Come up here!"