This was the last Cecil saw of her aunt for some time, for on the morrow the dowager departed to the Sussex manor-house. Before the week was out Mr. O'Boyneville had also taken wing, and Cecil was quite alone in the big empty Brunswick Square mansion. She had been allowed to have her own way. She had escaped the weariness of a sea-side excursion--the familiar gaieties of country-house visiting. She was alone with her books and her music, as she had wished to be. She was alone, and she found the autumn days too long for her, the Bloomsbury mansion too big and empty. Mr. O'Boyneville had no idea of being an inattentive husband. He sent his wife hasty lines scrawled on the flaps of envelopes in the intervals of his professional labours, and the hasty lines were full of kindness and anxiety for her welfare. But a couple of sentences written on the flap of an envelope are not calculated to "speak the soft intercourse from soul to soul;" and the barrister's brief scrawls afforded his wife very little food for reflection during her lonely hours. She wrote her husband long dutiful letters, two and three times a week; but she found this letter-writing rather a weary labour sometimes. What subjects were there on which she could be expansive? She took so little interest in his professional triumphs. He cared so little for her books and music. She shrank from putting her thoughts into words: but one conviction was slowly and surely taking root in her mind, and that conviction was that her marriage had been a mistake. "He ought to have married some good comfortable creature, who would have found occupation enough in household duties," she thought sometimes. "I read too much, and think too much, until I begin to feel that there is something wanting in my life." She had never dared to acknowledge to herself that the something wanting was a more genial companion than Laurence O'Boyneville. "He is so good to me, and I ought to love him so dearly," she thought in those moments of self-reproach which came very often in her lonely days. "I know that he is good, and honourable, and clever; what more can I wish him to be? Surely I ought to be proud of such a husband when I remember the fate of other women. What would become of me if I had married such a man as Mr. Lobyer?" There is a little story by Alfred de Musset, in which the heroine is married to a man whom she has passionately loved. She finds, too late, that there is little sympathy between them, and her life is very lonely. One night she is at the opera--alone, as she almost always is; and when the music, which she adores, fills her with uncontrollable emotion, she stretches out her hand involuntarily to clasp the sympathetic hand of a friend. The poor little hand falls upon the arm of an empty chair. The husband is no amateur of Mozart, and falls asleep on those rare occasions when he accompanies his wife to the opera.