So this was the trust he had placed in her, his wife, his ally, his colleague, of whose fertile brain and ready hand he had so often boasted. This one honest honourable association (as he had imagined it) he had kept hidden from her. And as this thought germinated and broadened in Pauline's mind her feelings passed into a new channel. She who had been her husband's adviser so long, and who had served him so well; she who had fondly imagined herself the trusted confidante and sharer of his inmost thoughts, now found that she had been slighted and considered not worthy to associate with this innocent piece of prettiness. The strange nature of the woman was roused to deadly retrospective anger, and the kindly contemptuous liking which she had begun to feel for Alice faded away. This pale-faced sleeping girl was her successful rival, though not in the manner she had at first supposed. She had felt an instinctive hatred of her when she saw her on the platform at Southampton, and her instinct never betrayed her. Tom Durham's sister! Pauline remembered that when her husband spoke of his early days, and the inmates of his home, it was always with a softened voice and manner, and with a certain implied respect, as though he were scarcely fitted, through his present surroundings and mode of life, even to mention so sacred a subject. This pale-faced girl had been one of those associations; she was too pure and too innocent, forsooth, to be mixed up with such society as her brother's wife was forced to keep. She, when she recovered her consciousness, would find herself a mark for the finger of scorn, a text for the Pharisee, a pariah, and an outcast. And so that weak, clinging, brainless thing was Tom Durham's sister, and preferred by him to his wife, with her grasp of mind and energy of purpose? The wife was to slave with him, and for him, to do the rough work, to be sent off here and there, travelling night and day, to lie to such a woman, to flatter such a man, to be always vigilant and patient, and to be punished with black looks, and sometimes with curses, if anything went wrong; while from the sister all difficulties and dangers were to be fended off, she was to be lapped in luxury, and her simplicity and innocence were to be as strictly guarded as though she had been a demoiselle in a convent.