"Why should I avoid her if it is such happiness to me to be near her?" he thought. "I have no foolish hope that she will ever be more to me than she is now. It ought to be enough for me to see her now and then, to spend such an evening as I have spent to-night, and to go back to my work all the better for so bright an interval of happiness. What can I want more than that, or what could be more delightful--while it lasts? But when I am old and grey and purblind, and have painted half-a-dozen bad pictures, and the public are tired of me, and the critics call my colour flimsy, and insolent young painters begin to talk of poor old William Crawford, who was once such a great card, will Mrs. Champernowne let me spend my evenings at the Hermitage _then_?" CHAPTER XVI. AT HOME IN BLOOMSBURY. The slow days, the long weeks, the interminable months dragged themselves out, and Cecil lived alone with her husband in the stately solitude of the northern side of Brunswick Square. The celebrated pea-green Hayne was wont to declare that his horses grew restive when he attempted to take them eastward of Temple Bar; and there are many people nowadays inferior in status to the elegant West-Indian millionaire, who shudder at the mention of Bloomsbury, and affect a serio-comic horror of the unknown latitudes on the northern side of Holborn. Mr. O'Boyneville had no fashionable aversion to an unfashionable locality. He liked his house in Brunswick Square, because it was big and stoutly built, like himself; and, as the belief that any thing appertaining to himself must necessarily be the very best thing of its kind in existence was deeply implanted in his tranquil breast, he was serenely unconscious of any brighter region than the comfortable square in which he had taken up his abode when he first found himself able to support a household of his own. If he had known that there were fairer places than Bloomsbury within reach of the courts of law; if he had fancied that there was any spot in or near London which would have been more pleasant for Cecil, he would have been quick to move his goods and chattels. He loved his wife honestly and truly, and would have made a heavier sacrifice to give her pleasure; but he knew about as much of a woman's tastes and prejudices as he knew of the habitudes and requirements of a white elephant; and he took Lady Cecil calmly home to the dreary, scantily-furnished Bloomsbury mansion, and left her to be happy after her own fashion in the spacious empty rooms while he went back to his work.