Cecil meant to write her letters before the first dinner-bell rang; but when the billiard-players had left her, she sank into a luxurious easy-chair by the fire, and sat looking dreamily at the red coals. She was in one of those melancholy moods which come upon a woman sometimes without any tangible reason, but which are not the less sad because their sadness is vague and intangible. For the moment she abandoned herself utterly to sorrowful musings. The past--that shadowy past which always comes back to the gayest of us with a sorrowful aspect, returned to Cecil as she brooded over the low, neglected fire. Her father, her mother--the loved and lost--whose faces had once made the sole brightness of her life, looked at her once more out of the shadows. She thought of what her life might have been if her father's fortune had never been wasted. Before her sad eyes arose the picture of the home that might have been hers if her only brother had lived to mend his wild ways and hold his own among honest men. "I should never have felt this bitter sense of loneliness if my brother had been my protector," she thought. "There is something in my aunt's kindness--even when she is most kind--that reminds me how little right I have to her love or protection." Abandoned to such melancholy thoughts as these, Cecil kept little note of the progress of time. A servant came into the room to replenish the fire, but his coming and going did not arouse her from her sombre reverie. The dull afternoon sky grew duller, and her thoughts grew sadder as the sky darkened. A bell rang, but she took no heed of its ringing. What was it to her who came or went? In the utter solitude of her life there was no room for care, for there was no one upon earth except her aunt whose fate was in any way involved with her own. She heard a rapid footstep in the hall, a hand turning the handle of the door, and she shrugged her shoulders impatiently, knowing that she would have to put aside her sorrowful thoughts, to smile upon the intruder. She looked up as the door opened, and it was with unmitigated astonishment that she beheld Laurence O'Boyneville. "Mr. O'Boyneville! I thought you had left us for good?" "And so I had, Lady Cecil, as I thought. But there are some places, or rather some people, whom it is very difficult to leave. I have been to London, got through a gigantic day's business, made arrangements for starting on my parliamentary work to-morrow instead of to-day, and have come back here--for an hour." "For an hour?" echoed Cecil. "Yes," answered the barrister, taking out his watch, and comparing it with the clock on the mantelpiece. "It's now half-past five by me; though it's only a quarter-past by my friend Mephistopheles and the ivy-leaves. At 7.36 the up-train leaves that miserable shed called Desborough station. I was lucky enough to get a fly this time, and the antiquated vehicle is waiting for me."