"Oh, I don't mean any unkindness towards him. But if you were only single, it would be so nice to make a match between you and the Major. Match-making is the natural occupation of a married woman, and I want an eligible couple to operate upon. Depend upon it, Mrs. Vancourt will set her cap at our Major." This was said _sotto voce_, for Mrs. Vancourt was the sentimental widow. The lady in question looked up from her book five minutes afterwards to expatiate upon a passage thereof. "Is not this true?" she said. "How well this man knows the human heart! 'Il n'y a jamais d'oubli où il y a eu de l'amour. Durant l'absence on croit toujours oublier, et on se trompe toujours. Mais lorsqu'on revoit celle qu'on a aimée, les années passées s'envolent comme le songe d'une nuit d'été, et on s'aperçoit qu'on n'a jamais cessé d'aimer.'" A faint blush spread itself over Cecil O'Boyneville's face as the widow finished her lecture; for there seemed to her some grain of truth amidst the French romancer's flimsy sentimentality. CHAPTER XXIV. BETWEEN CARTHAGE AND KENSINGTON. While the splendours and gaieties of Mr. Lobyer's household afforded conversation for the neighbourhood of Pevenshall, William Crawford the painter worked his hardest at a picture which he fondly hoped would be one of his best achievements. It was for this that he had declined his daughter's invitations,--for this, and perhaps just a little because the society of Mr. Lobyer was distasteful to him, and the gorgeousness of the Lobyer _menagé_ stifling and oppressive. He had refreshed himself with a month's holiday during the past autumn, and had spent his holiday in Venice, the city of his love,--the city to which he had taken flight after his first success,--to rest for a while amid the dreamy beauty of the Adriatic, the poetic glories of the past. After his holiday he had returned to the Fountains with a sketch for his new picture in his portfolio--a sketch that had been thought out and dreamed over as he lay back in his gondola, or basked, at full length, in some woody island, with pine-trees murmuring above his head, and blue and emerald-tinted wavelets creeping to his feet. The union between the painter and his only child had never been a very close one; and although pretty, frivolous Florence was very dear to his heart, her marriage had not made any great break in his life. He looked forward to seeing her early in the spring, when a Tyburnian mansion which Mr. Lobyer had hired at a rental of something between five and six hundred per annum, was to be furnished and fitted for the reception of its occupants; and in the mean time he was very happy alone in his painting-room, with the grand old cedars making a solemn shade in his garden, and his big canvas on the monster easel under the north-west light.