f his
sentiments with regard to her.

What woman but knows when a man loves her? What woman but knows (in
spite of all the lies she may utter to her own heart) when a man has
ceased to love her? In dark moments, in the cruel quiet of midnight,
has not the terrible certainty of her loss made her youth grow dead
within her?

Cecil's revenge has come, and I hardly think she spares it.
Scrupulously, carefully, she adheres to her _role_ of friend,
never for an instant permitting him to break through the cold barricade
of mere good-fellowship she has raised between them.

Should he in an imprudent moment seek to undermine this barrier, by a
word, a smile, sweet but chilling, she expresses either astonishment or
amusement at his presumption (the latter being perhaps the more
murderous weapon of the two, as ridicule is death to love), and so
checks him.

To her Sir Penthony is an acquaintance,--a rather amusing one, but
still an acquaintance only,--and so she gives him to understand; while
he chafes and curses his luck a good deal at times, and--grows
desperately jealous.

The development of this last quality delights Cecil. Her flirtation
with Talbot Lowry,--not that it can be called a flirtation, being a
very one-sided affair, the affection Talbot entertains for her being
the only affection about it,--carefully as he seeks to hide it,
irritates Sir Penthony beyond endurance, and, together with her marked
coldness and apparent want of desire for his society, renders him
thoroughly unhappy.

All this gratifies Cecil, who is much too real a woman not to find
pleasure in seeing a man made miserable for love of her.

"I wish you could bring yourself to speak to me now and then without
putting that odious 'Sir' before my name," he says to her one day.
"Anybody would say we were utter strangers."

"Well, and so we are," Cecil replies, opening wide her eyes in affected
astonishment. "How can you dispute it? Why, you never even saw me until
a few days ago."

"You are my wife at all events," says the young man, slightly
discomfited.

"Ay, more's the pity," murmurs her ladyship, with such a sudden,
bewitching, aggravating smile as entirely condones the incivility of
her speech. Sir Penthony smiles too.

"Cecil--Cis,--a pretty name.--It rhymes with kiss," he says, rather
sentimentally.

"So it does. And Penthony,--what does that rhyme with? Tony--money. Ah!
that was our stumbling block."

"It might have been a worse o