essed no reasons for her hatred of her late husband's elder son.
Hers were not reasons that could easily be put into words. They were
little reasons, trivial grains of offence which through long years had
accumulated into a mountain. They had their beginning in the foolish
grievance that had its birth with her own son, when she had realized
that but for that rosy-cheeked, well-grown boy borne to the Marquis by
his first wife, Marius would have been heir to Condillac. Her love of
her own child and her ambitions for him, her keen desire to see him fill
an exalted position in the world, caused her a thousand times a day to
wish his half-brother dead. Yet Florimond had flourished and grown, and
as he grew he manifested a character which, with all its imperfections,
was more lovable than the nature of her own offspring. And their common
father had never seen aught but the faults of Marius and the virtues
of Florimond. She had resented this, and Marius had resented it; and
Marius, having inherited with his mother's beauty his mother's arrogant,
dominant spirit, had returned with insolence such admonitions as from
time to time his father gave him, and thus the breach had grown. Later,
since he could not be heir to Condillac, the Marquise's eyes, greedy of
advancement for him, had fallen covetously upon the richer La Vauvraye,
whose lord had then no son, whose heiress was a little girl.

By an alliance easy to compass, since the lords of Condillac and La
Vauvraye were lifelong friends, Marius's fortunes might handsomely
have been mended. Yet when she herself bore the suggestion of it to
the Marquis, he had seized upon it, approved it, but adopted it for
Florimond's benefit instead.

Thereafter war had raged fiercely in the family of Condillac--a war
between the Marquis and Florimond on the one side, and the Marquise and
Marius on the other. And so bitterly was it waged that it was by the old
Marquis's suggestion that at last Florimond had gone upon his travels to
see the world and carry arms in foreign service.

Her hopes that he would take his death, as was a common thing when
warring, rose high--so high as to become almost assurance, a thing to be
reckoned with. Florimond would return no more, and her son should fill
the place to which he was entitled by his beauty of person and the high
mental gifts his doting mother saw in him.

Yet the months grew into years, and at long intervals full of hope for
the Marquise news came