"He brings sunshine with him wherever he goes," said the incautious dowager. "And to think that he should be a widower, with all the girls in London setting their caps at him, I dare say! Oh Cecil, Cecil, what a pity you were in such a hurry to marry that big blustering barrister!" This was the most cruel blow which Mrs. MacClaverhouse had ever inflicted on her niece. Cecil's reproachful look smote her with some sense of shame. "Well, I know I encouraged Mr. O'Boyneville," she said; "and of course he's a very excellent fellow, and tolerably well off--only tolerably, as things go nowadays. But still it _is_ a pity, you know, Cecil. However, there is nobody to be blamed; for who could imagine that poor namby-pamby wife of Hector's was going to die?" "Auntie, you mustn't talk like that," Cecil answered hastily. "My husband is good and kind and generous-minded, and I am very happy with him." This last statement was false; and what is worse, the speaker knew it to be false. But she fancied that it was her duty to say it, nevertheless. Perhaps she had some faint hope that by force of repetition it would come in time to be true. At what point did the path in which she was treading swerve from its straight course and become a fatal and crooked way, leading she knew not whither? Lady Cecil never knew when her footsteps first strayed across the invisible border-line between right and wrong; but she did know that a time came when her eyes met her husband's honest glance with a gaze that was not altogether fearless, when a vague sense of remorse oppressed her in her husband's presence. Alas for that fatal whirlpool of West-end life, those dangerous meetings on staircases and in conservatories, those idle mornings at horticultural fêtes, those sunny afternoons on race-courses, where the clamour of half-a-million voices drowns the insidious whisper of one voice for all but the too eager listener! and the chance encounters in the crowd, and the water parties, and the festal gatherings in shadowy gardens by the rippling river! Alas for all the machinery which the modern Mephistopheles finds made ready for his hand when he undertakes the perdition of any given victim!