She paused, and a vivid blush stole over her thoughtful face--not the crimson glow of indignation, but the warm brightness which reflects the roseate hue of a happy thought. Did he not care for her? That phrase about "caring for her" is the modest euphemism in which a woman disguises the bold word "love." Was he really so indifferent? Her protest to Mrs. MacClaverhouse had contained no syllable of untruth or prevarication. In all their intercourse, throughout all that cousinly intimacy which had been so sweet a friendship, Hector Gordon had not uttered a word which the vainest or most conscious coquette could construe into a confession of any thing warmer than friendship. "Ah! yet--and yet--and yet!" as Owen Meredith says, there had been something--yes, surely something! no spoken word, no license of glance, no daring pressure of a yielding hand--something fifty times less palpable, and yet a hundred times sweeter than any of these--a lowering of the voice--a tender tremulous tone now and then, a dreamy softness in the dark-blue eyes--a silence more eloquent than words--a sudden break in a sentence, that had a deeper meaning than a hundred sentences. "Poor auntie!" thought Lady Cecil, "it was silly of me to be so angry with her; for, after all, I think he does care for me--a little." Did she think of the contractor's wealth, or remember how high above poverty and dependence she would be lifted by a marriage with Hector Gordon? Did any vision of the corner house in Hyde-Park Gardens, the noble windows overlooking the woods and waters of Kensington, the elegant equipage and thoroughbred horses, arise before her side by side with the image of the young soldier? No. Through that most terrible of ordeals the furnace of genteel poverty--Lady Cecil had passed unscathed. When the remembrance of Hector Gordon's position flashed upon her presently, all her pride rose in arms against her weakness. "I would die rather than he should know that I care for him," she thought. "He might think me one of those calculating mercenary girls one reads of." Thus it was that, when Lady Cecil took her seat in the carriage that day, there was an air of restraint, a cold reserve in her manner, that Hector Gordon had never seen before.