Then she lay on her sofa and pondered many things.
She was a year older than her brother, and they had always been the
closest friends and comrades.
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.