And now, in the passage of the weeks, the mother and daughter were at home again, with Carlisle finding that memory still had power to stab, and Mrs. Heth stoutly girding herself for the great fight of her life, and almost happy....

If it had taken the violent break to reveal to Cally how deeply Hugo Canning had come into her life, it seemed to take this home-coming to impress upon her how definitely he had departed.  There was hardly anything in the house that was not in some way associated with him, or with her thought of him.  Outdoors it was hardly better:  wherever she turned, she found, mementoes of his absence.  Strange and sad to think that he and she would ride these familiar streets no more.  He had left her alone, to find her feet again in a changed world as best she might.  Where was he on this day and on this, with whom making merry, her false knight who could not love as he could fear the world’s opinion?...

It was September, and people were beginning to troop back in numbers from the holiday places of their desire.  Cally’s first days at home were full of meetings, with those now seen for the first time under strangely altered conditions.

She was not wanting in spirit, but she lacked her mother’s splendid pachydermousness.  More than mamma, she had shrunk from this first painful plunge, and now that it had come she was receptive to impressions which quite escaped the older lady.  Outwardly, indeed, as she perceived with some surprise, the greetings of friends and acquaintances were much as they had always been.  But she was at once conscious of a certain new quality in people’s looks, a certain hard exploring curiosity, not untouched with a fleeting and furtive air of triumph.  This look seemed to confront her, with varying degrees of emphasis, on nearly every face.  To her sensitiveness it was as if, beneath cordial speech, everybody was really saying:  “Aha!...  So you’re the young lady who hounded that chap into killing himself and got jilted for your pains.  Well, well!  Perhaps you won’t be quite so high-and-mighty after this....”

Even Carlisle’s most intimate friends, try as they doubtless did, seemed unable to help showing that they considered her lot in the world sadly changed.  So, indeed, it was.  Mattie and Evey could not, for instance, begin naturally by asking, “Cally, did you have a lovely summer?”—­when of course they knew very well that she had had a perfectly frightful summer.  Mattie came in before eleven o’clock on the first morning, chirping affectionate greetings; but neither then nor later did she manage to convey any real sense of sympathy with Cally, or of understanding what she had been through, or even of wanting to understand.  Cally would have liked to justify herself to Mattie, to talk her heart out to her, or to somebody; but Mattie’s idea was clearly to keep Cally’s mind off it, as you do with the near relatives of the deceased.  And was it possible that even Mats’s sweet girlishness showed a subtle trace of confirmation of the Frenchman’s bitter maxim, that in the misfortunes of our friends there is something not altogether displeasing to us?...