"Never," said Lady Anningford, "until you have married Morella Winmarleigh; then she would feel you were in good hands."
He laughed again—bitterly this time.
"Morella Winmarleigh! I would not be faithful to her for a week!"
"I wonder if you would be faithful to any woman, Hector? I have often thought you do not know what it means to love—really to love."
"You were perfectly right once. I did not know," he said; "and perhaps I don't now, unless to feel the whole world is a sickening blank without one woman is to love—really to love."
Anne noticed the weariness of his pose and the vibration in his deep voice. She was stirred and interested as she had never been. This dear brother of hers was not wont to care very much. In the past it had always been the women who had sighed and longed and he who had been amused and pleased. She could not remember a single occasion in the last ten years when he had seemed to suffer, although she had seen him apparently devoted to numbers of women.
"And what are you going to do?" she asked, with sympathy, "She is married, of course?"
"Yes."
"Hector, don't you want me to speak about it?"
He took a chair now by his sister's sofa, and he began to turn over the papers rather fast which lay on a table near by.