uld suppose that any
woman would be content under it."

Cecil's tongue refused to utter what oppressed her heart--those
evenings beside the sofa, those eager home expeditions for Sunday,
the uniform maintenance of his mother's supremacy.

"And you think absence from her would lessen her influence?"

"I am sure of it. There might be a struggle, but if I know Mr.
Charnock Poynsett rightly, he is too upright not to be conscious of
what is due to you, and be grieved not to be able to give you more--
that is, when his mother is not holding him in her grasp. Nor can
there be any valid objection, since Mrs Miles Charnock is always at
her service."

"She will return to Africa. I don't know why she and Rosamond have
been always so much more acceptable."

"They are not her rivals; besides, they have not your strength. She
is a woman who tries to break whatever she cannot bend, and the
instant her son began to slip from her grasp the contest necessarily
began. You had much better have it over once and for ever, and have
him on your side. Insist on a house of your own, and when you have
made your husband happy in it, then, then--Ah! Good morning--Sir
George!"

She had meant to say, "Then you win his heart," but the words would
not come, and a loathing hatred of the cold-hearted child who had a
property in Raymond so mastered her that she welcomed the
interruption, and did not return to the subject.

She knew when she had said enough, and feared to betray herself; nor
could Cecil bear to resume the talk, stunned and sore as she was at
the revelation, though with no suspicion that the speaker had been
the object of her husband's affection. She thought it must have
been the other sister, now in India, and that this gave the key to
many allusions she had heard and which she marvelled at herself for
not having understood. The equivocation had entirely deceived her,
and she little thought she had been taking counsel with the rival
who was secretly triumphing in Raymond's involuntary constancy, and
sowing seeds of vengeance against an ancient enemy.

She could not settle to anything when she came home. Life had taken
a new aspect. Hitherto she had viewed herself as born to all
attention and deference, and had taken it as a right, and now she
found herself the victim of a mariage de convenance to a man of
exhausted affections, who meant her only to be the attendant of his
domineering mother. The love that was dawning