h fire and water. But now
everybody was saying good things of him, and all he wanted was the
splendour which wealth would give him. Why should he not take it at
her hands, and why should not the world begin again for both of them?

But though she would dream that it might be so, she was quite sure
that there was no such life in store for her. The nature of the man
was too well known to her. Fickle he might be;--or rather capable of
change than fickle; but he was incapable of pretending to love when
he did not love. She felt that in all the moments in which he had
been most tender with her. When she had endeavoured to explain to him
the state of her feelings at Koenigstein,--meaning to be true in what
she said, but not having been even then true throughout,--she had
acknowledged to herself that at every word he spoke she was wounded
by his coldness. Had he then professed a passion for her she would
have rebuked him, and told him that he must go from her,--but it
would have warmed the blood in all her veins, and brought back to
her a sense of youthful life. It had been the same when she visited
him in the prison;--the same again when he came to her after his
acquittal. She had been frank enough to him, but he would not even
pretend that he loved her. His gratitude, his friendship, his
services, were all hers. In every respect he had behaved well to her.
All his troubles had come upon him because he would not desert her
cause,--but he would never again say he loved her.

She gazed at herself in the glass, putting aside for the moment the
hideous widow's cap which she now wore, and told herself that it
was natural that it should be so. Though she was young in years
her features were hard and worn with care. She had never thought
herself to be a beauty, though she had been conscious of a certain
aristocratic grace of manner which might stand in the place of
beauty. As she examined herself she found that that was not all
gone;--but she now lacked that roundness of youth which had been hers
when first she knew Phineas Finn. She sat opposite the mirror, and
pored over her own features with an almost skilful scrutiny, and told
herself at last aloud that she had become an old woman. He was in the
prime of life; but for her was left nothing but its dregs.

She was to go to Loughlinter with her brother and her brother's wife,
leaving her father at Saulsby on the way. The Chilterns were to
remain with her for one week, and no mor