Six years had passed since that evening, and still, when the Lady Goda
closed her eyes and thought of Sir Arnold, she saw him as she had seen
him then, with every line of his expression, every detail of his dress,
sitting beside her in the warm firelight, leaning forward a little in
his chair, and talking to her in a tone of voice that was meant to be
monotonous to the sleeper's ear, but not by any means to her own.
Between Warde and Curboil the acquaintance had matured--had been in a
measure forced in its growth by circumstances and mutual obligations;
but it had never ripened into the confidence of friendship on Warde's
side, while on Sir Arnold's it had been but a well-played comedy to
hide his rising hatred for the Lady Goda's husband. And she, on her
side, played her part as well. An alliance in which ambition had held
the place of heart could not remain an alliance at all when ambition
had been altogether disappointed. She hated her husband for having
disappointed her; she despised him for having made nothing of his many
gifts and chances, for clinging to an old cause, for being old-
fashioned, for having seen much and taken nothing--which makes 'rich
eyes and poor hands'--for being slow, good-natured, kind-hearted, and a
prey to all who wished to get anything from him. She reflected with
bitterness that for a matter of seven or eight years of waiting, and a
turn of chance which would have meant happiness instead of misery, she
might have had the widowed Sir Arnold for a husband and have been the
Archbishop of Canterbury's cousin, high in favour with the winning side
in the civil war and united to a man who would have known how to
flatter her cold nature into a fiction of feeling, instead of wasting
on her the almost exaggerated respect with which a noble passion
envelops its object, but which, to most women, becomes in the end
unspeakably wearisome.

Many a time during those six years had she and Sir Arnold met and