The haughty mistress’s soul sickened remorsefully within her when she saw suddenly appear upon the speaking countenance of the young lady before her a wan desolate look of agony.

The master-sentences of Edward’s letter were these:  ’You speak truly.  That we never meet again is the wisest and only proper course.  That I regret the past as much as you do yourself, it is hardly necessary for me to say.’

XII.  THE EVENTS OF TEN MONTHS

1.  DECEMBER TO APRIL

Week after week, month after month, the time had flown by.  Christmas had passed; dreary winter with dark evenings had given place to more dreary winter with light evenings.  Thaws had ended in rain, rain in wind, wind in dust.  Showery days had come—­the period of pink dawns and white sunsets; with the third week in April the cuckoo had appeared, with the fourth, the nightingale.

Edward Springrove was in London, attending to the duties of his new office, and it had become known throughout the neighbourhood of Carriford that the engagement between himself and Miss Adelaide Hinton would terminate in marriage at the end of the year.

The only occasion on which her lover of the idle delicious days at Budmouth watering-place had been seen by Cytherea after the time of the decisive correspondence, was once in church, when he sat in front of her, and beside Miss Hinton.

The rencounter was quite an accident.  Springrove had come there in the full belief that Cytherea was away from home with Miss Aldclyffe; and he continued ignorant of her presence throughout the service.

It is at such moments as these, when a sensitive nature writhes under the conception that its most cherished emotions have been treated with contumely, that the sphere-descended Maid, Music, friend of Pleasure at other times, becomes a positive enemy —­racking, bewildering, unrelenting.  The congregation sang the first Psalm and came to the verse—­

     ’Like some fair tree which, fed by streams,
       With timely fruit doth bend,
     He still shall flourish, and success
       All his designs attend.’

Cytherea’s lips did not move, nor did any sound escape her; but could she help singing the words in the depths of her being, although the man to whom she applied them sat at her rival’s side?

Perhaps the moral compensation for all a woman’s petty cleverness under thriving conditions is the real nobility that lies in her extreme foolishness at these other times; her sheer inability to be simply just, her exercise of an illogical power entirely denied to men in general—­the power not only of kissing, but of delighting to kiss the rod by a punctilious observance of the self-immolating doctrines in the Sermon on the Mount.

As for Edward—­a little like other men of his temperament, to whom, it is somewhat humiliating to think, the aberrancy of a given love is in itself a recommendation—­his sentiment, as he looked over his cousin’s book, was of a lower rank, Horatian rather than Psalmodic—­