It was characteristic of Lena's nature that she yielded to no one in appreciation of Felicity's beauty. Chastened rather than embittered by a conviction of her own loss, she was not without a consciousness of the appealing change which sleep now made in the woman she had such cause to dread. No hint remained of that imperious quality which moulded others to her will. She seemed to have grown softer, and there was something childlike in the position of her arm on the counterpane, in her hand turned palm upward, in her half-curled fingers. A lover, were he a poet, might have likened them to the petals of a flower that had begun to open with returning day. Presently the sleeper stirred and opened her eyes, dimly aware of a retreating presence and a closing door, but when, an hour later, she awoke fully, the impression was like that of a dream. It was ten o'clock when she rang her bell and ordered breakfast in her room. This order was as unusual as her late sleep, but she seemed to herself to have awakened a different person, one in whom such small changes of action were merely an index of greater possibilities. She received her father's inquiries through Lena with indifference, and sent back word that she had been only over-tired. Knowing that he lingered below to see her, she delayed deliberately until he should grow impatient and leave the house, for she wished to take up again the train of thought that had kept her so long awake the previous night. At present, her sole concern was of herself and of her lover. Having placed the steaming cup of coffee beside her on the dressing-table, she sipped it from time to time while she fastened up her hair. Like Leigh, she too had come to a new realisation of self, but the revelation was attended with far less of spiritual turmoil. It was as if she were making her own acquaintance over again, and the process was not without fascination. He had called her cruel. Was there truth in the charge? She had never been conscious of intentional cruelty, and yet she was intellectual enough to see that her husband might have good reason to accuse her of it in her treatment of him. But Leigh had no such cause of complaint, unless he would hold her responsible for her beauty. There must be some expression in her face which she herself had never seen, which she could never summon from its reflection in the mirror, an expression of desire, impersonal it might be, but moving the beholder to a personal response.