It was quite in vain that Cecil remonstrated, declaring that she was happier with her books and piano in the little back drawing-room in Dorset Square than at the most brilliant assemblage of the season. Was she happier at home than abroad, in this sad season, when it seemed to her as if all hope and gladness had utterly vanished out of her life? Was she happier? She employed the word in her remonstrance with her aunt; for she would fain have hidden her wounds from the sharp eyes of that unsentimental protectress. And at home she had at least the liberty of being unhappy. She could sit alone playing _his_ favourite music softly to herself in the dusk, while the dowager dozed at ease in the adjoining chamber. In society, she felt like a slave crowned with roses, compelled to wear the same company-smile night after night, to affect an interest in the same frivolous subjects, to hold her own amongst brilliant young ladies, who would have laughed her girlish sorrow to scorn could they have penetrated beneath the frozen calm of her manner. The brilliant young ladies declared that Cecil Chudleigh was proud. "The Aspendell Chudleighs always have been poor and proud," it was said. There were faster spirits who called her "slow," and who were pleased to ridicule the black robes of the dowager and the pale face and white-muslin draperies of her niece. And in the mean time Cecil went wherever the dowager chose to drag her, with an uncomplaining patience which might have won for her the crown of martyrdom, if there were any crowns for the martyrs of every-day life. The slow season dragged itself out. Ah, how long and how slow it seemed to Cecil Chudleigh, while she heard so many voices declare how delicious a season it was--how especially gay and brilliant. It was over at last, and Mrs. MacClaverhouse conveyed her niece to Brighton, where, on the windy downs so familiar to her girlhood, Cecil found a pensive kind of pleasure in wandering alone, with her seal-skin jacket wrapped tightly across her chest, and the plumes of her little hat fluttering in the autumn blast. The weather could not be too cold or too dull for Cecil. She went to look at the little lonely house where so many years of her joyless life had been passed, and standing in the distance, she looked sadly at the familiar windows, the patch of lawn, where the salt sea-breezes had blighted her geraniums, where the cruel breath of the mistral had slain her pet-blossoms of rose and honeysuckle. "I did not know _him_ when I lived there," she thought. "What foolish creatures women must be! It seems to me now as if there could not have been a time in which I did not know him. Hector Gordon! His name would have meant nothing if I had heard it then; and now the sound of any other name at all like his sends a thrill of anguish through my heart."