She had married without love; and yet no base or mercenary motive had influenced her conduct. Truly and unreservedly had she given her faith to Laurence O'Boyneville. It is for the man who marries such a woman to win or lose the heart which is not--and yet is so nearly--his. Unhappily, Mr. O'Boyneville, with all honesty of purpose and generosity of heart, took the very way to lose the prize which, of all earthly treasures, he most desired to obtain. If the barrister's wife had dissolved into tears at the breakfast-table or disturbed his digestive organs by a storm of hysterics after dinner, Mr. O'Boyneville would have perceived that there was something out of gear amidst the machinery of his home, and would have done his uttermost to remedy the defect. But the disease which was undermining Lady Cecil's moral constitution was not sorrow; it was only the absence of joy. Of what could she complain, who desired nothing upon earth except a little rest after the weariness of her youth? She rested to her heart's content in the tranquil solitude of Brunswick Square, withdrawing herself day by day more completely from all old associations. If the days were joyless, they were at least without cares or troubles; the sordid perplexities of the past were done with--that slow torture called genteel poverty was hers no longer. An atmosphere of commonplace comfort pervaded the great O'Boyneville's household; and even in Dorset Square his presence seemed to carry with it an odour of prosperity--for Cecil was surprised to find that her aunt no longer bewailed the hardness of a dowager's lot, and the thievish propensities of landladies. Poor Cecil, who was so painfully familiar with every note in the gamut of Mrs. MacClaverhouse's domestic economy, was astonished to behold those expensive and unprofitable dishes, which of old had been excluded from the Dorset Square _menus_, now figuring frequently in the little banquets which the dowager provided for Mr. O'Boyneville and his wife. "I ought to be happy," Cecil said to herself sometimes; and sometimes even in saying those words the faint odour of the sea came back to her like a breath of the past, and she saw the low grey shore below Fortinbras Castle, and Hector Gordon's face bent over her in passionate sadness. "My fate was in my hand that day," she thought. "What would my life have been now if I had chosen otherwise than I did?"