"Yes," answered the dowager; "and we are to live in Dorset Square all our lives, I suppose. Upon my word, Cecil, you are enough to provoke the patience of a saint. You might have married Hector Gordon if you had liked. Yes, child, you might. I watched the man. I've known him since he eat his first top-and-bottom, and I can see him eating it, in my mind's eye, at this very moment; so I think I ought to know his ways. He was over head and ears in love with you; and if it hadn't been for some highflown nonsense of yours he never would have gone back to India to marry that designing minx. He was engaged, forsooth! and if he was, I suppose he could have disengaged himself! He was in love with you Cecil, and you know that you might have married him as well as I do. What was he whimpering about that night, I should like to know, when you sang him your doleful songs, if he wasn't in love! No man in his proper senses would moon about all day with two women, reading poetry and listening to doleful songs, unless he was in love. However, I've no doubt some nonsensical scruples of yours sent him back to Calcutta to become the prey of a minx called Chesham. Who _are_ the Cheshams, I should like to know? It sounds a decent name enough; but I don't know any Cheshams. Give me the first volume of Burke's _Landed Gentry_, Cecil, and let me see if there are any respectable Cheshams." Lady Cecil went into an inner room to look for the volume her aunt required. She found herself standing before the bookshelves, looking dreamily at the backs of the books, and wondering what it was she had come to seek. For some few moments she was quite unable to collect her thoughts. Was she sorry that Hector Gordon had fulfilled his engagement? Ah, no! ah, no, no! To have wished his promise broken would have been to wish him something less than he was. "Oh, I am proud to think him good, and honourable, and true," she murmured, in a kind of rapture; "I am proud and glad to think that he has kept his promise." Ah, reader, can you not imagine that the pale girl in Mr. Millais' picture was in the depths of her soul almost glad that her Huguenot lover refused to have the white scarf tied about his arm? His refusal would cost him his life, perhaps, but oh, how proud she must have been of him in that moment of supreme agony! Lady Cecil carried the volume of Burke to her aunt, and Mrs. MacClaverhouse set herself to discover the antecedents of Mrs. Hector Gordon, _nèe_ Chesham. "There's a letter from Mrs. Lochiel on the table there," she said, without looking up from her book, "with an account of this fine wedding. You can read it if you like."