The Parliamentary Session had reached the stage that is ended by no power save that of grouse, and the streets were full of vans fantastically decorated with baths, chairs, bedsteads, and nursery gear.

Cecil could see two before different house-doors as she sat behind her muslin curtains, looking as fresh and healthful as ever, and scarcely more matronly, except that her air of self-assertion had become more easy and less aggressive now that she was undisputed mistress of the house in London.

There was no concern on her part that she was not the mother of either of the two latest scions of the house of Charnock. Certainly she did not like to be outdone by Rosamond; but then it was only a girl, and she could afford to wait for the son and heir; indeed, she did not yet desire him at the cost of all the distinguished and intellectual society, the concerts, soirées, and lectures that his non-arrival left her free to enjoy. The other son and heir interested her nearly, for he was her half-brother. There had been something almost ludicrous in the apologies to her. His mother seemed to feel like a traitor to her, and Mr. Charnock could hardly reconcile his darling’s deposition with his pride in the newcomer. Both she and Raymond had honestly rejoiced in their happiness and the continuance of the direct line of Dunstone, and had completed the rejoicing of the parents by thorough sympathy, when the party with this unlooked-for addition had returned home in the spring. Mrs. Charnock had insisted on endowing his daughter as largely as he justly could, to compensate for this change in her expectations, and was in doubt between Swanmore, an estate on the Backsworth side of Willansborough, and Sirenwood itself, to purchase and settle on her. Raymond would greatly have preferred Sirenwood, both from its adjoining the Compton property and as it would be buying out the Vivians; but there were doubts about the involvements, and nothing could be done till Eleonora’s majority. Mr. Charnock preferred Swanmore as an investment, and Raymond could, of course, not press his wishes.

A short visit had been made at Dunstone to join in the festivities in honour of the little heir, but Cecil had not been at Compton since Christmas, though Raymond had several times gone home for a Sunday when she had other companionship. Charlie had been with them preparing his outfit for India whither he had been gone about a month; and Frank, though living in lodgings, was the more frequently at his sister-in-law’s service, because wherever she was the Vivian sisters might be looked for.

No sooner had Raymond taken the house in – Square than Lady Tyrrell had engaged the opposite one, so that one household could enjoy evening views of the other’s interior, and Cecil had chiefly gone into society under her friend’s auspices. Her presentation at Court had indeed been by the marchioness; she had been staying with an old friend of Mrs. Poynsett’s, quite prepared to be intimate with Raymond Poynsett’s wife, if only Cecil would have taken to her. But that lady’s acceptance of any one recommended in this manner was not to be thought of, and besides, the family were lively, merry people, and Cecil was one of those who dislike and distrust laughter, lest it should be at themselves. So she remained on coldly civil terms with that pleasant party, and though to a certain degree following her husband’s lead as to her engagements, all her ways were moulded by her friend’s influence. Nor was the effect otherwise than becoming. Nothing could be in better taste than all in Mrs. Charnock Poynsett’s establishment, and London and Lady Tyrrell together had greatly improved her manners. All her entertainments went off well, and she filled her place in the world with grace and skill, just as she had always figured herself doing.

Yet there was a sense of disappointment and dissatisfaction, which increased upon her as the time drew nearer for returning to be again only a guest in her married home. It was a tangible grievance on which her mind could fix itself. Surely it was hard on her that her husband should require it of her, and yet she perceived that he could not avoid it, since his mother was mistress. She knew too that he was unfailingly kind, attentive, and indulgent, except on that one occasion when he had sharply reproved her for her behaviour in the Tallboys matter; and strange to say, a much stronger feeling towards him had been setting in ever since that one time when she had seen him thoroughly angry. She longed and craved to stir that even, gentle courtesy to frowns or smiles; and yet there was a perversity in her nature that seem to render it impossible to her to attempt to win a smile from him, far more so to lay aside any device or desire of her own to gratify him. All she did know was, that to be all that her ambition had sought, a Charnock by marriage as well as birth, and with a kind, considerate husband, was not enough to hinder a heartsickness she had never known or supposed possible.

Presently, through the flowers in her balcony, Cecil saw the opening and closing of the opposite house-door, and a white parasol unfurled, and she had only time to finish and address her letter to Mrs. Duncombe before Lady Tyrrell was announced.

“Here I am after a hard morning’s work, winding up accounts, &c.”

“You go to-morrow?”

“Yes, trusting that you will soon follow; though you might be a cockney born, your bloom is town-proof.”

“We follow as soon as the division on the Education Question is over, and that will not be for ten days. You are come to look at my stores for the bazaar; but first, what are you going to do this afternoon?”

“What are your plans?”

“I must leave cards at half-a-dozen people’s at the other end of the park. Will you come with me? Where is Lenore?”

“She is gone to take leave of the Strangeways’ party; Lady Susan insisted on having her for this last day. Poor Frank! I confess impartially that it does not look well for him.”

“Poor Frank!” repeated Cecil, “he does look very forlorn when he hears where she is.”

“When, after all, if the silly boy could only see it, it is the most fortunate thing that could happen to him, and the only chance of keeping his head above water. I have made Lady Susan promise me two of her daughters for the bazaar. They thoroughly know how to make themselves useful. Oh, how pretty!”

For Cecil was producing from the shelves of various pieces of furniture a large stock of fancy articles—Swiss carvings, Spa toys, Genevese ornaments, and Japanese curiosities, which, as Lady Tyrrell said, “rivalled her own accumulation, and would serve to carry off the housewives and pen-wipers on which all the old maids of Wil’sbro’ were employed.”

“We must put out our programmes,” Cecil added; “people will not work in earnest till the day is fixed and they know the sellers.”

“Yes, the lady patronesses are most important,” said Lady Tyrrell, writing them down: “Mrs. Raymond Charnock Poynsett; Lady Rosamond, eh?”

“Oh no, Julius won’t hear of it.”

“And opposition is sweet: so we lose her romantic name, and the stall of the three brides. Mrs. Miles Charnock is too much out of the world to be worth asking. Then myself—Mrs. Duncombe, Mrs. Fuller, as a matter of necessity, Mrs. Moy.”

“Oh!”

“Needful, my dear, to propitiate that set. Also that mayoress, Mrs. Truelove, isn’t she? Six. We’ll fill up with country people!”

Six more distinguished names were soon supplied of ladies who would give their patronage, provided neither toil nor care was required of them; and still consulting, the two friends took their seats in the carriage. The time of the bazaar was to be fixed by the opening of the town-hall, which was to take place on the 12th of September—a Thursday, the week before the races; and the most propitious days appeared to be the Tuesday and Wednesday before the Great Backsworth Cup Day, since the world would then be in an excited, pleasure-seeking state, favourable to their designs.

“I shall have a party in the house,” said Lady Tyrrell: “shall you be able?”

“I can’t tell; you know it does not depend on me, and I certainly shall not ask it as a favour. Camilla, did I tell you that I tried to make my father understand the state of things, and speak to Raymond? But he would only say, that while I am so young and inexperienced, it is a great advantage for me to live with Mrs. Poynsett, and that I must be the greatest comfort to her. Papa is an intense believer in Mrs. Poynsett, and when he once has taken up a notion nothing will convince him.”

“You can’t even make capital of this purchase of a house of your own?”

“I don’t like to do that.”

“My dear, I see your delicacy and forbearance, and I would not urge you, if I did not see how deeply your happiness is concerned. Of course I don’t mean merely the authority over the wirthschaft, though somehow the cares of it are an ingredient in female contentment; but forgive me, Cecil, I am certain that you will never take your right place—where you care for it more—till you have a home of your own.”

“Ah!” The responsive sound burst from the very depths of Cecil’s heart, penetrated as they had never been before; but pride and reserve at once sprang up, and she answered coldly, “I have no reason to complain.”

“Right, my dear Cecil, I like you the better;” and she pressed her hand.

“It is quite true,” said Cecil, withdrawing hers.

“Quite, absolutely true. He would die rather than give you any reason for the slightest murmur; but, Cecil, dearest, that very heedfulness shows there is something he cannot give you.”

“I don’t know why you should say so,” answered a proud but choked voice.

“I say so,” replied the clear tones, firmly, though with a touch of pity, “because I see it. Cecil, poor child, they married you very young!”

“I missed nothing,” exclaimed Cecil; but she felt that she could only say so in the past, and her eyes burnt with unshed tears.

“No, my dear, you were still a girl, and your deeper woman’s heart had not grown to perceive that it was not met.”

“He chose me,” she faintly said.

“His mother needed a daughter. It was proper for him to marry, and you were the most eligible party. I will answer for it that he warned you how little he could give.”

“He did,” cried Cecil. “He did tell me that he could not begin in freshness and warmth, like a young man; but I thought it only meant that we were too sensible to care about nonsense, and liked him for it. He always must have been staid and reserved—he could never have been different, Camilla. Don’t smile in that way! Tell me what you mean.”

“My dear Cecil, I knew Raymond Poynsett a good many years before you did.”

“And—well? Then he had a first love?” said Cecil, in a voice schooled into quiet. “Was he different then? Was he as desperate as poor Frank is now?”

“Frank is a very mild copy of him at that age. He overbore every one, wrung consent from all, and did everything but overcome his mother’s calm hostility and self-assertion.”

“Did that stop it? She died of course,” said Cecil. “She could not have left off loving him.”

“She did not die, but her family were wearied out by the continual objections to their overtures, and the supercilious way of treating them. They thought it a struggle of influence, and that he was too entirely dominated for a daughter-in-law to be happy with her. So they broke it off.”

“And she—” Cecil looked up with searching eyes.

“She had acutely felt the offence, the weakness, the dutifulness, whatever you may choose to call it, and in the rebound she married.”

“Who is she?” gasped Cecil.

“It is not fair to tell you,” was the gentle answer, with a shade of rebuke. “You need not look for her. She is not in the county.”

“I hope I shall never see her!”

“You need not dread doing so if you can only have fair play, and establish the power that belongs rightly to you. She would have no chance with you, even if he had forgiven her.”

“Has not he?”

“Never!”

“And he used up all his heart?” said Cecil in a low, musing tone.

“All but what his mother absorbed. She was a comparatively young and brilliant woman, and she knew her power. It is a great ascendancy, and only a man’s honest blindness could suppose that any woman would be content under it.”

Cecil’s tongue refused to utter what oppressed her heart—those evenings beside the sofa, those eager home expeditions for Sunday, the uniform maintenance of his mother’s supremacy.

“And you think absence from her would lessen her influence?”

“I am sure of it. There might be a struggle, but if I know Mr. Charnock Poynsett rightly, he is too upright not to be conscious of what is due to you, and be grieved not to be able to give you more—that is, when his mother is not holding him in her grasp. Nor can there be any valid objection, since Mrs Miles Charnock is always at her service.”

“She will return to Africa. I don’t know why she and Rosamond have been always so much more acceptable.”

“They are not her rivals; besides, they have not your strength. She is a woman who tries to break whatever she cannot bend, and the instant her son began to slip from her grasp the contest necessarily began. You had much better have it over once and for ever, and have him on your side. Insist on a house of your own, and when you have made your husband happy in it, then, then—Ah! Good morning—Sir George!”

She had meant to say, “Then you win his heart,” but the words would not come, and a loathing hatred of the cold-hearted child who had a property in Raymond so mastered her that she welcomed the interruption, and did not return to the subject.

She knew when she had said enough, and feared to betray herself; nor could Cecil bear to resume the talk, stunned and sore as she was at the revelation, though with no suspicion that the speaker had been the object of her husband’s affection. She thought it must have been the other sister, now in India, and that this gave the key to many allusions she had heard and which she marvelled at herself for not having understood. The equivocation had entirely deceived her, and she little thought she had been taking counsel with the rival who was secretly triumphing in Raymond’s involuntary constancy, and sowing seeds of vengeance against an ancient enemy.

She could not settle to anything when she came home. Life had taken a new aspect. Hitherto she had viewed herself as born to all attention and deference, and had taken it as a right, and now she found herself the victim of a mariage de convenance to a man of exhausted affections, who meant her only to be the attendant of his domineering mother. The love that was dawning in her heart did but add poignancy to the bitterness of the revelation, and fervour to her resolve to win the mastery over the heart which was her lawful possession.

She was restless till his return. She was going to an evening party, and though usually passive as to dress, she was so changeable and difficult to satisfy that Grindstone grew cross, and showed it by stern, rigid obedience. And Cecil well knew that Grindstone; who was in authority in the present house, hated the return to be merely the visitor of Alston and Jenkins.

In the drawing-room Cecil fluttered from book to window, window to piano again, throwing down her occupation at every sound and taking up another; and when at last Raymond came in, his presence at first made her musings seem mere fancies.

Indeed it would have been hard to define what was wanting in his manner. He lamented his unavoidable delay, and entertained her with all the political and parliamentary gossip he had brought home, and which she always much enjoyed as a tribute to her wisdom, so much that it had been an entire, though insensible cure for the Rights of Woman. Moreover, he was going with her to this ‘drum,’ though he would greatly have preferred the debate, and was to be summoned in case of a division. She knew enough of the world to be aware that such an attentive and courteous husband was not the rule. But what was courtesy to one who longed for unity?

“Is Frank to be there this evening?” he asked.

“Yes, I believe so.”

“I thought he was to have gone with us.”

“He told me not to depend on him. He had made an engagement to ride into the country with Sir Harry Vivian.” And she added, though the proud spirit so hated what seemed to her like making an advance that it sounded like a complaint, “So you can’t avoid going with me?”

“I should any way have gone with you, but I may have to leave you to Frank to see you away,” he said. “And I had rather have Frank here than with that set.”

“Breaking up one of our few tête-à-tête evenings, and they are becoming few enough!”

This murmur gratified him, and he said, “We shall be more alone together now. The Rectory is almost ready, and Julius means to move in another week, and I suppose Miles will carry Anne off before the year is over.”

“Yes, we are the only ones with no home.”

“Rather, we hold fast to the old home.”

“Not my old home.”

“Does not mine become yours?”

“Not while—.” She paused and started afresh. “Raymond, could we not live at Swanslea, if it is bought for us?”

“Swanslea! Five miles off! Impossible.”

Cecil was silent.

“My dear Cecil,” he said, after a few moments’ consideration, “I can understand that you felt unfortunately crowded last year, but all that is over, and you must see that we are necessary to my mother, and that all my duties require me to live at home.”

“You could attend to the property from Swanslea.”

“The property indeed! I meant my mother!”

“She has Anne.”

“Anne will soon be in Africa—even if she were more of a companion. I am sorry it is a trial to you; for my proper place is clearly with my mother, the more in her helpless state, and with my brothers gone out into the world. Now that the numbers are smaller, you will find it much easier to take the part that I most earnestly wish should be yours.”

“I cannot get on with her.”

“Do not say so! Do not think so! To have Rosamond there with her Irish ease, and her reserve, kept you in the background before; I say it, but I could not help it; and now there will be no hindrance to your drawing together. There is nothing I so desire.”

If the carriage had not stopped as he spoke Cecil would not have uttered the thought that smote her, namely, that his desire was on behalf, not of his wife, but of his mother, to whom he was ready to sacrifice her happiness without a pang. She did not see that he could imagine no greater happiness for her than a thorough love of his mother.

They certainly were not the happiest couple present as they walked up-stairs, looking like a model husband and wife, with their name echoing from landing to landing.

If any expression savouring of slang could possibly be applied to Raymond, he might be said to be struck all of a heap by his wife’s proposition. He had never even thought of the possibility of making a home anywhere but at Compton Poynsett, or of his wife wishing that he should do so; and proverbial sayings about the incompatability of relatives-in-law suddenly assumed a reasonableness that he could not bear to remember.

But his courtesy and sense of protection, trained by a woman of the old school, would not suffer him to relax his attention to his wife. Though he was very anxious to get back to the house, he would not quit her neighbourhood till he had found Frank and intrusted her to him.

He was not happy about Frank. The youth was naturally of an intellectual and poetical temperament, and had only cared for horses and field-sports as any healthy lad growing up in a country house must enjoy them; and Raymond had seen him introduced to the style of men whom he thought would be thoroughly congenial to him, and not unlikely to lead him on to make a mark in the world.

But that unfortunate Vivian attachment stood in the way; Sir Harry and his elder daughter ignored it entirely, but did not forbid Frank the house; though Lady Tyrrell took care, as only she could do, that Eleonora should never have ten minutes private conversation with him, either at home or abroad. Even in a crowd, a ball, or garden-party, the vigilant sister had her means of breaking into any kind of confidence; and Frank was continually tantalized by the pursuit. It could not but unsettle him, and draw him into much more gaiety than was compatible with the higher pursuits his mother had expected of him; and what was worse, it threw him into Sir Harry Vivian’s set, veteran roués, and younger men who looked up to their knowingness and listened to their good stories.

What amount of harm it was doing Raymond could not guess. He had known it all himself, and had escaped unscathed, but he did not fear the less for his younger brother, and he only hoped that the inducement to mingle with such society would be at an end before Frank had formed a taste for the habits that there prevailed.

Eleonora Vivian had been much admired at first, but her cold manner kept every one at a distance, and her reserve was hardly ever seen to relax. However, her one friendship with the Strangeways family gave Raymond hopes that her constancy was not proof against the flattering affection, backed by wealth, that seemed to await her there. The best he could wish for Frank was that the infatuation might be over as soon as possible, though he pitied the poor fellow sincerely when he saw him, as he did to-night, waiting with scarcely concealed anxiety while Miss Vivian stood listening to a long discourse about yachting from an eager pair of chattering girls.

Then some break occurred, and Frank moved up to her. “Your last evening! How little I have seen of you!”

“Little indeed!”

“I called, but you were at the Strangeways’.”

“They are very kind to me. When is your holiday?”

“Not till spring, but I may get a few days in the autumn: you will be at home?”

“As far as I know.”

“If I thought for a moment you cared to see me; but you have shown few signs of wishing it of late.”

“Frank—if I could make you understand—”

They were walking towards a recess, when Lady Tyrrell fastened upon Raymond. “Pray find my sister; she forgets that we have to be at Lady Granby’s—Oh! are you there, Lenore! Will you see her down, Mr. Poynsett? Well, Frank, did you get as far as you intended?”

And she went down on his arm, her last words being, “Take care of yourself till we meet at home. For this one year I call Sirenwood home—then!”

Raymond and Lenore said no more to one another. The ladies were put into the carriage. The elder brother bade Frank take care of Cecil, and started for Westminster with the poor lad’s blank and disappointed face still before his eyes, hoping at least it was well for him, but little in love with life, or what it had to offer.