Lady Anningford was more or less a happy and contented woman now, but there had been moments in her life scorched by passion and infinite pain.  Long ago in the beginning when she first came out she had had the misfortune to fall in love with Cyril Lamont, married and bad and attractive.  It had given him great pleasure to evade the eye of Lady Bracondale, pure dragon and strict disciplinarian.  Anne was a good girl, but she was eighteen years old and had tasted no joy.  She was not an easy prey, and her first year had passed in storms of emotion suppressed to the best of her powers.

The situation had been full of shades and contrasts.  The outward, a strictly guarded lamb, the life of the world and aristocratic propriety; and the inward, a daily growing mad love for an impossible person, snatched and secret meetings after tea in country-houses, walks in Kensington Gardens, rides along lonely lanes out hunting, and, finally, the brink of complete ruin and catastrophe—­but for Hector.

“Where should I be now but for Hector?” her thoughts ran.

Hector was just leaving Eton in those days, and had come up and discovered matters, while she sobbed in his arms, at the beginning of her second season.  He had comforted her and never scolded a word, and then he had gone out armed with a heavy hunting-crop, found Cyril Lamont, and had thrashed the man within an inch of his life.  It was one of Hector’s pleasantest recollections, the thought of his cowering form, his green silk smoking-jacket all torn, and his eyes sightless.  Cyril Lamont’s talents had not run in the art of self-defence, and he had been very soon powerless in the hands of this young athlete.

The Lamonts went abroad that night, and stayed there for quite six months, during which time Anne mended her broken heart and saw the folly of her ways.

Hector and she had never alluded to the matter all these years, only they were intimate friends and understood each other.

Lady Bracondale adored Hector and was fond of Anne, but had no comprehension of either.  Anne was a frondeuse, while her mother’s mind was fashioned in carved lines and strict boundaries of thought and action.

XVII

Meanwhile, Hector reached the opera, and made his way to the omnibus box where he had his seat.

He felt he could not stand Morella Winmarleigh just yet.  The second act of “Faust” was almost over, and with his glass he swept the rows of boxes in vain to find Theodora.  He sat a few minutes, but restlessness seized him.  He must go to the other side and ascertain if she could be discovered from there.  Morella Winmarleigh’s box commanded a good view for this purpose, so after all he would face her.

He looked up at her opposite.  She sat there with his mother, and she seemed more thoroughly wholesomely unattractive than ever to him.

He hated that shade of turquoise blue she was so fond of, and those unmeaning bits and bows she had stuck about.  She was a large young woman with a stolid English fairness.