ty and tenderness, altogether new to her. Yet she was constantly
thinking of Falloden; building up her own harrowed vision of his
remorse, or dreaming of the Marmion ball, and the ride in the bluebell
wood,--those two meetings in which alone she had felt happiness with
him, something distinct from vanity, and a challenging love of power.
Now it was all over. They would probably not meet again, till he had
forgotten her, and had married some one else. She was quite aware of his
fixed and businesslike views for himself and his career--as to marriage,
travel, Parliament and the rest; and it had often pleased her wilfulness
to think of modifying or upsetting them. She had now far more abundant
proof of his haughty self-centredness than their first short
acquaintance on the Riviera had given her; and yet--though she tried to
hide it from herself--she was far more deeply absorbed in the thought of
him. When all was said, she knew that she had treated him badly. The
effect of his violence and cruelty towards Radowitz had been indeed to
make her shudder away from him. It seemed to her still that it would be
impossible to forgive herself should she ever make friends with Douglas
Falloden again. She would be an accomplice in his hardness of heart and
deed. Yet she recognised guiltily her own share in that hardness. She
had played with and goaded him; she had used Radowitz to punish him; her
championship of the boy had become in the end mere pique with Falloden;
and she was partly responsible for what had happened. She could not
recall Falloden's face and voice on their last walk without realising
that she had hit him recklessly hard, and that her conduct to him had
been one of the causes of the Marmion tragedy.

She was haunted by these thoughts, and miserable for lack of some
comforting, guiding, and--if possible--absolving voice. She missed her
mother childishly day and night, and all that premature self-possession
and knowledge of the world, born of her cosmopolitan training, which at
Oxford had made her appear so much older than other English girls of
twenty, seemed to have broken away, and left her face to face with
feelings she could not check, and puzzles she wanted somebody else
to judge.

For instance--here was this coming visit to her aunts in Yorkshire.
Their house in Scarfedale was most uncomfortably near to Flood Castle.
The boundaries of the Falloden estate ran close to her aunts' village.
She would run many chance