After the autumn at Brighton, there came the dowager's customary winter round of visits, the Christmas festivities, the refined hospitality of a modern country-house, from which only the coarser elements of old-fashioned joviality have been eliminated. It was all very cheery and pleasant, and to any one but a young lady with a broken heart could scarcely have failed to prove delightful. Other people besides Lady Cecil had their troubles, and contrived to forget them. Gay young bachelors blotted from their memory the amounts of their tailors'-bills, and the threatening phraseology of lawyers'-letters, which had followed them even to that hospitable shelter; match-making matrons forgot the ages of their daughters and the failures of the past season, the tendency of dear Maria's nose to get a little red after dinner, and the alarming sharpness of poor Sophy's shoulders; Paterfamilias forgot the delinquencies of his favourite son--it almost always is the favourite son who turns out so badly; and the young Cantab, who had lately been plucked, lulled himself into a sweet unconsciousness of his featherless condition. Grim Care found the door of Annerwold Manor House shut in his face, and was fain to obtain an entrance to the hospitable mansion by sneaking down the chimney of Cecil's chamber to haunt the girl with the memory of Hector Gordon's face as she lay awake in the dead of the night. She could not forget him--yet. When the first snowdrops peeped pale and pure from their sheltering leaves, the dowager went back to Dorset Square, and all the old dreary round of housekeeping detail began again for Cecil Chudleigh. The spoons and the china, the butcher's uncertainty as to weight, and the poulterer's extortionate prices, seemed more than usually wearisome to Cecil this year. Her burden had been easy to bear before the coming of Hector Gordon--before that one bright interval in her life, by contrast with which the rest of her existence was so dull and joyless. He had loved her, and left her. It was her own decision which had separated them for ever. But sometimes--in some weak moment of depression, some foolish dreamy interval of reverie--there arose before her the vision of what might have been, if the man who loved her had refused to accept her decision; if love had been stronger than reason; if, in spite of herself, he had beaten down the barrier that divided them, and had stayed in England to make her his wife. "How do I know that this girl loves him as well as I do?" she thought, bitterly. "My aunt may be right, perhaps, in her worldly wisdom, and this Miss Chesham may have only cared for him because he was a good match. Girls are sent out to India on purpose to get married, and how can it be expected they should be otherwise than mercenary?"