The five years or so since Paul Enderby’s reappearance in England seemed to have been not unprosperous.  The house to which Maud was welcomed by her father and mother was not a large one, and not in a very fashionable locality, but it was furnished with elegance.  Mrs. Enderby frequently had her hired brougham, and made use of it to move about a good deal where people see and are seen.  Mr. Enderby’s business was “in the City.”  How he had surmounted his difficulties was not very clear; his wife learned that he had brought with him from America a scheme for the utilisation of waste product in some obscure branch of manufacture, which had been so far successful as to supply him with a small capital.  He seemed to work hard, leaving home at nine each morning, getting back to dinner at half-past six, and, as often as not, spending the evening away from home, and not returning till the small hours.  He had the feverish eye of a man whose subsistence depends upon speculative acuteness and restless calculation.  No doubt he was still so far the old Paul, that, whatever he undertook, he threw himself into it with surpassing vigour.

Mrs. Enderby was in her thirty-eighth year, and still handsome.  Most men, at all events, would have called her so, for most men are attracted by a face which is long, delicate, characterless, and preserves late the self-conscious expression of a rather frivolous girl of seventeen.  She had ideals of her own, which she pursued regardless of the course in which they led her; and these ideals were far from ignoble.  To beauty of all kinds she was passionately sensitive.  As a girl she had played the piano well, and, though the power had gone from long disuse, music was still her chief passion.  Graceful ease, delicacy in her surroundings, freedom from domestic cares, the bloom of flowers, sweet scents—­such things made up her existence.  She loved her husband, and had once worshipped him; she loved her recovered daughter; but both affections were in her, so to speak, of aesthetic rather than of moral quality.

Intercourse between Maud and her parents, now that they lived together, was, as might have been expected, not altogether natural or easy.  She came to them with boundless longings, ready to expend in a moment the love of a lifetime; they, on their side, were scarcely less full of warm anticipation; yet something prevented the complete expression of this mutual yearning.  The fault was not in the father and mother if they hung back somewhat; in very truth, Maud’s pure, noble countenance abashed them.  This, their child, was so much the superior of them both; they felt it from the first moment, and could never master the consciousness.  Maud mistook this for coldness; it checked and saddened her.  Yet time brought about better things, though the ideal would never be attained.  In her father, the girl found much to love; her mother she could not love as she had hoped, but she regarded her with a vast tenderness,