Then, suddenly, all this had become serious.  She was like the playing child on whose hand the wasp sat down.  But in this case the moral sting of what had happened was abidingly sharp and painful.  The tragedy of Radowitz, together with the charm interwoven with all her few recollections of him, had developed in Connie feelings of unbearable pity and tenderness, altogether new to her.  Yet she was constantly thinking of Falloden; building up her own harrowed vision of his remorse, or dreaming of the Marmion ball, and the ride in the bluebell wood,—­those two meetings in which alone she had felt happiness with him, something distinct from vanity, and a challenging love of power.  Now it was all over.  They would probably not meet again, till he had forgotten her, and had married some one else.  She was quite aware of his fixed and businesslike views for himself and his career—­as to marriage, travel, Parliament and the rest; and it had often pleased her wilfulness to think of modifying or upsetting them.  She had now far more abundant proof of his haughty self-centredness than their first short acquaintance on the Riviera had given her; and yet—­though she tried to hide it from herself—­she was far more deeply absorbed in the thought of him.  When all was said, she knew that she had treated him badly.  The effect of his violence and cruelty towards Radowitz had been indeed to make her shudder away from him.  It seemed to her still that it would be impossible to forgive herself should she ever make friends with Douglas Falloden again.  She would be an accomplice in his hardness of heart and deed.  Yet she recognised guiltily her own share in that hardness.  She had played with and goaded him; she had used Radowitz to punish him; her championship of the boy had become in the end mere pique with Falloden; and she was partly responsible for what had happened.  She could not recall Falloden’s face and voice on their last walk without realising that she had hit him recklessly hard, and that her conduct to him had been one of the causes of the Marmion tragedy.

She was haunted by these thoughts, and miserable for lack of some comforting, guiding, and—­if possible—­absolving voice.  She missed her mother childishly day and night, and all that premature self-possession and knowledge of the world, born of her cosmopolitan training, which at Oxford had made her appear so much older than other English girls of twenty, seemed to have broken away, and left her face to face with feelings she could not check, and puzzles she wanted somebody else to judge.

For instance—­here was this coming visit to her aunts in Yorkshire.  Their house in Scarfedale was most uncomfortably near to Flood Castle.  The boundaries of the Falloden estate ran close to her aunts’ village.  She would run many chances of coming across Douglas himself, however much she might try to avoid him.  At the same time Lady Marcia wrote continually, describing the plans that were being made to entertain her—­eager, affectionate letters, very welcome in spite of their oddity to the girl’s sore and orphaned mood.  No she really couldn’t frame some clumsy excuse, and throw her aunts over.  She must go, and trust to luck.