There was, however, no mistaking the real warmth of his welcome, and for the moment—only for the moment—Freda's heart beat quick.
'I am so glad to see you, Freda,—sister Freda, you know, now,—and looking so well.'
'Yeth, ith'nt the looking well. I think the lookth younger than when the went away.'
'Handsomer, at any rate. I may pay you a compliment, now, Freda.'
Freda could not return it. Colonel Vaughan looked more than six years older since his marriage, and there was a dissatisfied expression on his countenance very different from the old suavity.
Freda was not long in discovering that if he had improved his fortune by marriage he had not improved his temper, or increased his happiness. Fortunately for his wife, her imperturbable placidity and want of acute feeling prevented her from appropriating many hard hits from her husband that would have made Freda wretched.
Again, she admired the tact of the mother. By it she managed her husband admirably, and retained her power over him in precisely the same way as she did before she married him; while Wilhelmina wholly lost what little she had gained over hers prior to her marriage. Her silliness annoyed him continually, and her beauty, for want of expression, palled upon his fastidious taste.
Freda's contempt very soon turned to pity. The handsome, fascinating, deceitful colonel was amply indemnified for all the hearts he had broken, and those broken hearts fully avenged by the tedium of his home life.
Of course, Freda did not discover all this during that one Christmas Day, but it developed itself during her subsequent stay at Glanyravon.
'We did not ask any one else to dinner to-day, Gwynne,' said Mr Gwynne, 'because we thought Freda would like to have us alone, you know, and see the children, and—and all that sort of thing.'