nce which come as
the ebb-tide between the struggles of passion. She retired to the piano,
and busied herself with arranging her music, not at all insensible to the
pleasure of being looked at with admiration the while, and thinking that,
the next time the door opened, Captain Wybrow would enter, and she would
speak to him quite cheerfully. But when she heard him come in, and the
scent of roses floated towards her, her heart gave one great leap. She
knew nothing till he was pressing her hand, and saying, in the old easy
way, 'Well, Caterina, how do you do? You look quite blooming.'

She felt her cheeks reddening with anger that he could speak and look
with such perfect nonchalance. Ah! he was too deeply in love with some
one else to remember anything he had felt for _her_. But the next moment
she was conscious of her folly;--'as if he could show any feeling then!'
This conflict of emotions stretched into a long interval the few moments
that elapsed before the door opened again, and her own attention, as well
as that of all the rest, was absorbed by the entrance of the two ladies.

The daughter was the more striking, from the contrast she presented to
her mother, a round-shouldered, middle-sized woman, who had once had the
transient pink-and-white beauty of a blonde, with ill-defined features
and early embonpoint. Miss Assher was tall, and gracefully though
substantially formed, carrying herself with an air of mingled
graciousness and self-confidence; her dark-brown hair, untouched by
powder, hanging in bushy curls round her face, and falling in long thick
ringlets nearly to her waist. The brilliant carmine tint of her
well-rounded cheeks, and the finely-cut outline of her straight nose,
produced an impression of splendid beauty, in spite of commonplace brown
eyes, a narrow forehead, and thin lips. She was in mourning, and the dead
black of her crape dress, relieved here and there by jet ornaments, gave
the fullest effect to her complexion, and to the rounded whiteness of her
arms, bare from the elbow. The first coup d'oeil was dazzling, and as she
stood looking down with a gracious smile on Caterina, whom Lady Cheverel
was presenting to her, the poor little thing seemed to herself to feel,
for the first time, all the folly of her former dream.

'We are enchanted with your place, Sir Christopher,' said Lady Assher,
with a feeble kind of pompousness, which she seemed to be copying from
some one else: 'I'm sure your nephe