But in the next moment Lady Cecil reproached herself for having thought so basely of her happy rival. The heart of Lord Aspendell's daughter was brave and generous, womanly and true; but there are moments of weakness and uncertainty which overtake the noblest of the vanquished in the battle of life. In these weak moments Cecil tried in vain to shut from her mind the picture of what her life might have been if Hector Gordon had been free to marry her. She had loved him for himself alone, and would have loved him as truly if he had been penniless; but in her thought of him she could not forget the fact of his wealth. That gold which is so sordid a thing in itself is also the keystone to many things that are not sordid; and the only man who needs be ashamed of his affection for the yellow dross is he who loves it with a morbid and diseased passion for the stuff itself, and not the noble uses that may be made of it. Cecil remembered the Scotchman's wealth, and all the power that goes along with wealth, and there rose before her the vision of a spot in which her childhood had been spent, and which she loved with a passionate affection; a place she never hoped to see again, except in her dreams; and the image of it haunted her in them when she was most sorrowful--most weary of the joyless gaieties of her London life. The place was a long rambling white house, built under the shelter of woody hills, and surrounded by the loveliest gardens in North Devon. It lay hidden in the very heart of a wood, and was called Chudleigh Combe. You heard the distant roar of the waves breaking on a rocky shore, and only by that sound knew how near all that luxuriant pastoral beauty was to the mighty grandeur of the sea. Within a mile of Chudleigh Combe there was a tiny fishing-village, a steep hilly street almost inaccessible to any but its wild denizens, a bay of bright yellow sand, and a ruined fortress on a rock. The place had been invaded lately by exploring tourists, some of whom found their way to Chudleigh, where there were a few valueless old pictures, of the most severely-dingy school; a handsome collection of Oriental china, and a good deal of quaint old furniture; brass-inlaid chests of drawers, wherein Evelina and Cecilia might have kept their finery; Indian _secrétaires_, at which Clarissa Harlowe might have written her famous letters; high-backed chairs, on which Sir Charles Grandison might have sat, gentleman-like and unbending.