“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.