. Her
love--or was it really lust--for Rupert Louth still ravaged her. The
thought of "the Crouch's" triumph still persecuted her mind. Terrible
pictures of a happiness she had no share in still made every night
hideous to her. She longed for Rupert Louth, but she longed also to be
reinstated in her self-esteem. That glance of a stranger had helped her.
She asked herself whether a man of that type, young, amazingly handsome,
would ever send such a glance to Mother Hubbard. Suddenly she felt
safer, as if she could hold up her head once more. Really she had always
held it up, but to herself, since Louth's blunt confession, she had been
a woman bowed down, old, done with, a thing fit for the scrap heap.
Now a slight, almost trembling sensation of returning self-esteem stole
through her. She could not have been mistaken about the brown man's
interest in her, for the Duchess of Wellingborough had specially
noticed it. She wondered who he was, whether he really had brought
introductions, where he was staying, whether he would presently appear
in her set. His brown eyes were gentle and yet enterprising. He looked
like a sportsman, she thought, and yet as if he were more intellectual,
more subtle than Louth. There seemed to be a slight thread of sympathy
between her and him! She had felt it immediately when they had met in
Bond Street. She wondered whether he had felt it too.

In all probability if Lady Sellingworth had been in a thoroughly normal
condition at this time she would not have thought twice about such a
trifling episode as a stranger's glance at her in the street. But she
was not in a normal condition. She was the prey of acute depression
and morbidity. Life was becoming hideous to her. She exaggerated her
loneliness in the midst of society. She had mentally constructed for
herself a new life with Louth as her husband. Imaginatively she had
lived that life until it had become strangely familiar to her, as an
imagined life can become to a highly strung woman. The abrupt and brutal
withdrawal of all possibility of it as a reality had made the solitude
of her widowhood seem suddenly terrible, unnatural, a sort of nightmare.
She had moments of desperation in which she said to herself, "This
cannot go on. I can't live alone any more or I shall go mad." In such
moments she sometimes thought of rewarding Sir Seymour Portman's long
fidelity. But something in her, something imperious, shrank at the
thought. She did not want