Cecil's revenge has come, and I hardly think she spares it. Scrupulously, carefully, she adheres to her rôle of friend, never for an instant permitting him to break through the cold barricade of mere good-fellowship she has raised between them.
Should he in an imprudent moment seek to undermine this barrier, by a word, a smile, sweet but chilling, she expresses either astonishment or amusement at his presumption (the latter being perhaps the more murderous weapon of the two, as ridicule is death to love), and so checks him.
To her Sir Penthony is an acquaintance,—a rather amusing one, but still an acquaintance only,—and so she gives him to understand; while he chafes and curses his luck a good deal at times, and—grows desperately jealous.
The development of this last quality delights Cecil. Her flirtation with Talbot Lowry,—not that it can be called a flirtation, being a very one-sided affair, the affection Talbot entertains for her being the only affection about it,—carefully as he seeks to hide it, irritates Sir Penthony beyond endurance, and, together with her marked coldness and apparent want of desire for his society, renders him thoroughly unhappy.
All this gratifies Cecil, who is much too real a woman not to find pleasure in seeing a man made miserable for love of her.
"I wish you could bring yourself to speak to me now and then without putting that odious 'Sir' before my name," he says to her one day. "Anybody would say we were utter strangers."
"Well, and so we are," Cecil replies, opening wide her eyes in affected astonishment. "How can you dispute it? Why, you never even saw me until a few days ago."
"You are my wife at all events," says the young man, slightly discomfited.
"Ay, more's the pity," murmurs her ladyship, with such a sudden, bewitching, aggravating smile as entirely condones the incivility of her speech. Sir Penthony smiles too.
"Cecil—Cis,—a pretty name.—It rhymes with kiss," he says, rather sentimentally.