The dowager and her niece went back to Dorset Square very soon after Hector's departure: and then came visits to country houses--a fortnight in Leicestershire, where poor Cecil had to endure the hunting talk of horsey men and fast young ladies, the perpetual discussions about dogs and horses and southerly winds and cloudy skies; a month in an old Yorkshire grange, where there was a cheerful Christmas gathering, and where Lady Cecil had to act in charades and take part in duets--the dear old duets in which his melodious barytone had been so delicious. She looked round sometimes when she was singing, and almost expected to see his ghost standing behind her,--so cruel a profanation did it seem to sing the old familiar words. In all the morning gossip, and billiard-playing and fancy-work, the reading aloud--often from the very books which _he_ had read at Fortinbras--in all the music and dancing, the impromptu charades, and carefully studied _tableaux-vivants_ which enlivened the winter evenings, Cecil had to take her part with a smiling face. She wondered sometimes whether there were any other bright smiles which were only masks assumed for the evening with the evening dress. She wondered whether there was any other woman in all the crowd who saw athwart the lights and exotics of the dinner-table the vision of one dear face whose reality was thousands of miles away. "He may be lying dead while I sit simpering here," she thought. "Yet that would be too dreadful. Oh! surely, surely I should know it if he were dead!" Bravely though she bore her burden, it was a very heavy one. No mother, pining in the absence of her only son, could have felt more poignant anxiety about the absent one than Cecil felt for the man who had loved her and left her to marry another woman. How often--ah, how often, amidst the hum of joyous voices, and the brilliant tones of a piano vibrating under masterly hands--how often the lamplight faded, and the faces of the crowd melted away, and the gorgeous drawing-room changed itself into that weedy shore at the foot of grim Fortinbras Castle, while the autumn rain drifted once more into Cecil Chudleigh's face, and _his_ eyes looked down upon her dim with tears. Of all their gay and happy hours, their pleasant rambles, Cecil recalled no picture so vivid as that of her lover, in his sorrow, standing bareheaded in the drifting rain, looking tenderly down upon her with fond despairing eyes. And he was gone from her for ever; never, never, never, so long as she lived, was she to look upon his face again. But she endured her life, and by-and-by, when cold gleams of February sunshine lighted the grey sky, the dowager carried her niece back to Dorset Square, and all the old sordid wearisome care about forks, spoons, and broken wine-glasses and incorrect butcher's bills, began again.