tly,
alienated from her, and provoked by her. But then, why did he still
pursue her?--why did he still lay claim to the privileges of their old
intimacy, and why did Cicely allow him to do so?

At last one evening, after a visit from Marsworth which had been one jar
from beginning to end, Cicely had suddenly dropped on a stool, beside
Nelly on the sofa.

'What an intolerable man!' she said with crimson cheeks. 'Shall I tell
Simpson not to let him in again?'

Nelly looked her surprise, for as yet there had been no confidence on
this subject between them. And then had come a torrent--Cicely walking
stormily up and down the room, and pouring out her soul.

The result of which outpouring was that through all the anger and
denunciation, Nelly very plainly perceived that Cicely was a captured
creature, endeavouring to persuade herself that she was still free. She
loved Marsworth--and hated him. She could not make up her mind to give
up for his sake the 'lust of the eye and the pride of life,' as he
clearly would endeavour to make her give them up, the wild bursts of
gaiety and flirting for which she periodically rushed up to town, the
passion for dress, the reckless extravagance with which it pleased her
to shock him whenever they met. And he also--so it seemed to Nelly--was
torn by contradictory feelings. As soon as Cicely was within reach, he
could not keep away from her; and yet when confronted with her, and some
new vagary, invented probably to annoy him, though he might refrain
'even from good words,' his critical mouth and eye betrayed him, and set
the offender in a fury.

However, it was the quarrels between these two strange lovers, if they
were lovers, that had made a friendship, warm and real--on Cicely's side
even impassioned--between Nelly and Cicely. For Cicely had at last found
someone--not of her own world--to whom she could talk in safety. Yet she
had treated the Sarratts cavalierly to begin with, just because they
were outsiders, and because 'Willy' was making such a fuss with them;
for she was almost as easily jealous in her brother's case as in
Marsworth's. But now Nelly's sad remoteness from ordinary life, her very
social insignificance, and the lack of any links between her and the
great Farrell kinship of relations and friends, made her company, and
her soft, listening ways specially welcome and soothing to Cicely's
excited mood.

During the latter half of the winter they had corresponded, though