Elsie was there,
influencing him against his old friends--poor, bitter, stricken Elsie.
Eugenie's lips quivered. There flitted before her the image of the
girl of eighteen--muse of laughter and delight. And she recalled
the taciturn woman whom she had seen on her sofa the night before,
speaking coldly, in dry, sharp sentences, to her husband, her cousin,
her maid--evidently unhappy and in pain.

Eugenie shaded her eyes from the light of the terrace. Her heart
seemed to be sinking, contracting. Mrs. Welby had been already ill,
and therewith jealous and tyrannical, for some little time before
Madame de Pastourelles had been summoned to the death-bed of her
husband! But now!--Eugenie shrank aghast before what she saw and what
she guessed.

And it was, too, as if the present state of things--as if the new
hardness in Elsie's eyes, and the strange hostility of her manner,
especially towards the Findons, and her cousin Eugenie--threw light on
earlier years, on many a puzzling trait and incident of the past.

There had been a terrible confinement, at the end of years of
childlessness--a still-born child--and then, after a short apparent
recovery, a rapid loss of strength and power. Poor, poor Elsie! But
why--why should this trouble have awakened in her this dumb tyranny
towards Arthur, this alienation from Arthur's friends?

Eugenie sharply drew herself together. She banished her thoughts.
Elsie was young, and would get well. And when she recovered, she would
know who were her friends, and Arthur's.

A figure came towards her, crossing the _parterre d'eau_. She
perceived her father--just released, no doubt, from two English
acquaintances with whom he had been exploring the 'Bosquet d'Apollon.'

He hurried towards her--a tall Don Quixote of a man, gaunt, active,
grey-haired, with a stride like a youth of eighteen, and the very
minimum of flesh on his well-hung frame. Lord Findon had gone through
many agitations during the last ten or twelve years. In his own
opinion, he had upset a Ministry, he had recreated the army, and saved
the Colonies to the Empire. That history was not as well aware of
these feats as it should be, he knew; but in the memoirs, of which
there were now ten volumes privately printed in his drawer, he
had provided for that. Meanwhile, in the rush of his opinions and
partisanships, two things at least had persisted unchanged--his
adoration for Eugenie--and his belief that if only man--and much more
wo