ears before Therese came.
Should you require your hair done, Therese will do that; mamma thinks
Catherine would not make any hand at it."

She quitted the room as she spoke, and closed the door, saying that she
would send up Catherine then. Lionel had his eyes fixed on the room and
its furniture; it was really an excellent room--spacious, lofty, and
fitted up with every regard to comfort as well as to appearance. In the
old days it was Jan's room, and Lionel scarcely remembered to have been
inside it since; but it looked very superior now to what it used to look
then. Lady Verner had never troubled herself to improvise superfluous
decorations for Jan. Lionel's chief attention was riveted on the bed, an
Arabian, handsomely carved, mahogany bed, with white muslin hangings,
lined with pink, matching with the window-curtains. The hangings were
new; but he felt certain that the bed was the one hitherto used by his
mother.

He stepped into the dressing-room, feeling more than he could have
expressed, feeling that he could never repay all the kindness they
seemed to be receiving. Equally inviting looked the dressing-room. The
first thing that caught Lionel's eye were some delicate paintings on the
walls, done by Decima.

His gaze and his ruminations were interrupted. Violent sobs had struck
on his ear from the bed-chamber; he hastened back, and found Sibylla
extended at full length on the sofa, crying.

"It is such a dreadful change after Verner's Pride!" she querulously
complained. "It's not half as nice as it was there! Just this old
bedroom and a mess of a dressing-room, and nothing else! And only that
stupid Catherine to wait upon me!"

It _was_ ungrateful. Lionel's heart, in its impulse, resented it as
such. But, ever considerate for his wife, ever wishing, in the line of
conduct he had laid down for himself, to find excuses for her, he
reflected the next moment that it _was_ a grievous thing to be turned
from a home as she had been. He leaned over her; not answering as he
might have answered, that the rooms were all that could be wished, and
far superior they, and all other arrangements made for them, to anything
enjoyed by Sibylla until she had entered upon Verner's Pride; but he
took her hand in his, and smoothed the hair from her brow, and softly
whispered--

"Make the best of it, Sibylla, for my sake."

"There's no 'best' to be made," she replied, with a shower of tears, as
she pushed his hand and his face a