Lady Elliston continued to talk: indeed it was she and Augustine who did most of the talking. Sir Hugh only interjected a remark now and then from his place before the fire. Amabel was able to feel a further change in him; he was displeased today, and displeased in particular, now, with Lady Elliston. She thought that she could understand the vexation for him of this irruption of his real life into the sad little corner of kindness and duty that Charlock House and its occupants must represent to him. He had seldom spoken to her about Lady Elliston; he had seldom spoken to her about any of the life that she had abandoned in abandoning him: but she knew that Lord and Lady Elliston were near friends still, and with this knowledge she could imagine how on edge her husband must be when to the near friend of the real life he could allow an even sharper note to alter all his voice. Amabel heard it sadly, with a sense of confused values: nothing today was as she had expected it to be: and if she heard she was sure that Lady Elliston must hear it too, and perhaps the symptom of Lady Elliston's displeasure was that she talked rather pointedly to Augustine and talked hardly at all to Sir Hugh: her eyes, in speaking, passed sometimes over his figure, rested sometimes, with a bland courtesy, on his face when he spoke; but Augustine was their object: on him they dwelt and smiled.
The years had wrought few changes in Lady Elliston. Silken, soft, smiling, these were, still, as in the past, the words that described her. She had triumphantly kept her lovely figure: the bright brown hair, too, had been kept, but at some little sacrifice of sincerity: Lady Elliston must be nearly fifty and her shining locks showed no sign of fading. Perhaps, in the perfection of her appearance and manner, there was a hint of some sacrifice everywhere. How much she has kept, was the first thought; but the second came:--How much she has given up. Yes; there was the only real change: Amabel, gazing at her, somewhat as a nun gazes from behind convent gratings at some bright denizen of the outer world, felt it more and more. She was sweet, but was she not too skilful? She was strong, but was not her strength unscrupulous? As she listened to her, Amabel remembered old wonders, old glimpses of motives that stole forth reconnoitring and then retreated at the hint of rebuff, graceful and unconfused.