“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.