displayed itself much too brilliantly.  Still, the missile was an extreme retort, and on the whole it could not be wondered at that husband and wife resolved to live apart in future.  Mr. Lessingham was, in fact, an aristocratic boor, and his wife never puzzled so much over any intellectual difficulty as she did over the question how, as a girl, she came to imagine herself enamoured of him.  She was not, perhaps, singular in her concernment with such a personal problem.

“It is six years since I was in Italy,” she said, when greetings were over, and she had seated herself.  “Don’t you envy me my companion, Mrs. Spence?  If anything could revive one’s first enjoyment, it would be the sight of Cecily’s.”

Cecily was sitting by Miriam, whose hand she had only just relinquished.  Her anxious and affectionate inquiries moved Miriam to a smile which seemed rather of indulgence than warm kindness.

“How little we thought where our next meeting would be!” Cecily was saying, when the eyes of the others turned upon her at her aunt’s remark.

Noble beauty can scarcely be dissociated from harmony of utterance; voice and visage are the correspondent means whereby spirit addresses itself to the ear and eye.  One who had heard Cecily Doran speaking where he could not see her, must have turned in that direction, have listened eagerly for the sounds to repeat themselves, and then have moved forward to discover the speaker.  The divinest singer may leave one unaffected by the tone of her speech.  Cecily could not sing, but her voice declared her of those who think in song, whose minds are modulated to the poetry, not to the prose, of life.

Her enunciation had the peculiar finish which is acquired in intercourse with the best cosmopolitan society, the best in a worthy sense.  Four years ago, when she left Lancashire, she had a touch of provincial accent,—­Miriam, though she spoke well, was not wholly free from it,—­but now it was impossible to discover by listening to her from what part of England she came.  Mrs. Lessingham, whose admirable tact and adaptability rendered her unimpeachable in such details, had devoted herself with artistic zeal to her niece’s training for the world; the pupil’s natural aptitude ensured perfection in the result.  Cecily’s manner accorded with her utterance; it had every charm derivable from youth, yet nothing of immaturity.  She was as completely at her ease as Mrs. Lessingham, and as much more graceful in her self-control as the advantages of nature made inevitable.

Miriam looked very cold, very severe, very English, by the side of this brilliant girl.  The thinness and pallor of her features became more noticeable; the provincial faults of her dress were painfully obvious.  Cecily was not robust, but her form lacked no development appropriate to her years, and its beauty was displayed by Parisian handiwork.  In this respect, too, she had changed remarkably since Miriam last saw her, when she was such a frail child.  Her hair of dark gold showed itself beneath a hat which Eleanor Spence kept regarding with frank admiration, so novel it was in style, and so perfectly suitable to its wearer.  Her gloves, her shoes, were no less perfect; from head to foot nothing was to be found that did not become her, that was not faultless in its kind.