"Why, mother, it was poor Jack Delamere's dying legacy." "It is such a shaggy, self-willed, huge and savage animal--always about one's skirts or in one's way." "You are unusually energetic in your adjectives this evening, my lady mother," replied Audley; "poor Rajah is as gentle as a lamb, and I might have found a kind owner for him ere this, however," he added, as he thought sadly of the winning Sybil on whose skirts his splendid pet had been permitted to nestle unrebuked. "Visitors, mamma!" exclaimed Gartha Trevelyan, a fair-haired and languid edition of her mother, and already, in her sixteenth year, the imitator of all her tones and ways; "who can they be--in a hired carriage, too?" "Ladies in deep mourning," said General Trecarrel, glancing uneasily at Audley. "By Jove!" muttered the latter, growing quite pale, as he recognised them from a bay window, and at once quitting the library, descended by a private staircase to where his horse and groom happened to be awaiting him. "My cousin--he is my own cousin; this was the secret sympathy--the tie of blood that drew us to each other," Sybil was thinking softly, in her timid heart, to keep her courage up, at the very time when he who, without flinching, would have faced a Sikh gun-battery, or a horde of Afghans, was avoiding her, and galloping ingloriously away from what he deemed "a scene--a deuced family row," with a blush on his cheek, shame, pity, and anger mingling in his soul, with the half-formed wish that he had never met and never known her! Advancing into the room, the mother and daughter bowed, and then stood irresolute. The former had expected to have seen Downie alone; but finding him thus, amid his family, and the General present too, all her pre-arranged and carefully considered explanations and remarks completely fled her memory, and her mind became blank as a sheet of unwritten paper, as Downie, after a rapid whisper to his wife, over whose colourless face there flashed a look of angry scorn, took the initiative. His wife, with her everlasting smelling-bottle or vinaigrette and lace handkerchief; her newly-cut novel close by; her pale, dull eyes and unmeaning smile; her "company manners;" her soft white hands, smooth and unwrinkled as her forehead, yet cold and puerile as her heart, was always a kind of bore; but now her _tout-ensemble_ had all the impress of insipidity, animated by insolence; for weak though the lawyer's wife was in character, she felt that she was mistress of the situation; and at least _pro tem._, if not for life, Lady Lamorna. She regarded the widow with a cold and supercilious stare, to which the former replied by a steady gaze, and each seemed to draw her conclusions of the other in an instant, for "to women alone pertains that marvellous freemasonry, which sees the character at a glance, and investigates the sincerity of a disposition or the value of a lace flounce with the same practised facility."