When she married Lord Newhaven he took so slight a part, though a necessary one, in the wedding groups that their completeness had never been marred by misgivings as to his exact position in them. When, six years later, after one or two mild flirtations which only served as a stimulus to her love of dress--when at last she met, as she would have expressed it, "the one love of her life," her first fluctuations and final deviation from the path of honor were the result of new arrangements round the same centre. The first groups in which Hugh took part had been prodigies of virtue. The young mother with the Madonna face--Lady Newhaven firmly believed that her face, with the crimped fringe drawn down to the eyebrows, resembled that of a Madonna--with her children round her, Lord Newhaven as usual somewhat out of focus in the background; and Hugh, young, handsome, devoted, heartbroken, and ennobled for life by the contemplation of such impregnable virtue. "You accuse me of coldness," she had imagined herself saying in a later scene, when the children and the husband would have made too much of a crowd, and were consequently omitted. "I wish to Heaven I were as cold as I appear." And she had really said it later on. Hugh never did accuse her of coldness, but that was a detail. Those words, conned over many times, had nevertheless actually proceeded out of her mouth. Few of us have the power of saying anything we intend to say. But Lady Newhaven had that power, and enjoyed also in consequence a profound belief in her prophetic instincts; while others, Hugh not excepted, detected a premeditated tone in her conversation, and a sense of incongruity between her remarks and the occasion which called them forth. From an early date in their married life Lord Newhaven had been in the habit of discounting these remarks by making them in rapid rotation himself before proceeding to the matter in hand. "Having noticed that a mother--I mean a young mother--is never really happy in the absence of her children, and that their affection makes up for the carelessness of their father, may I ask, Violet, what day you wish to return to Westhope?" he said one morning at breakfast. "Any day," she replied. "I am as miserable in one place as in another." "We will say Friday week, then," returned Lord Newhaven, ignoring, as he invariably did, any allusions to their relative position, and because he ignored them she made many. "The country," he added, hurriedly, "will be very refreshing after the glare and dust and empty worldly society of London." She looked at him in anger. She did not understand the reason, but she had long vaguely felt that all conversation seemed to dry up in his presence. He mopped it all into his own sponge, so to speak, and left every subject exhausted.