There were times when Cecil felt a vague yearning for the touch of that sympathetic hand; there were times when a chilling sense of intellectual loneliness oppressed her spirits, and when she felt that it would have been better for her if the daily cares about plate and china, and all the little sordid duties of her Dorset-Square life, had still demanded her thought and attention. Did she ever think of the young widower far away in his time of mourning? Did the picture of that which might have been arise more vividly before her vision now that the cold hand of death had loosened Hector Gordon's bondage? Alas! yes; struggle as she might against the tempter, there were times when she felt herself weak, and wicked; there were times when the face that had looked down upon her under the sunless autumn sky looked at her again out of the shadows of her lonely room, instinct with the same melancholy tenderness--the same passionate devotion. "I ought to be content to remember that for one moment in my life I was loved like that," she thought. "I am as foolish as I am wicked when I let his image come back to me. What could I be to him if we met now, and I were as free as he is? Can I suppose that he remembers me, after all the domestic sweetness of his brief married life--after the terrible sorrow in which it has come to an end? Ah, no, thank God for that; the past has made a gulf between us which nothing in the present can bridge over. If we met to-morrow, we should meet as strangers. I can almost fancy the look of indifference I should see in his face."