CHAPTER VIII.
Le plus grand element des mauvaises actions secretes, des lachetes inconnues, est peut-etre un honheur incomplet.
-- BALZAC.
When Fay, in her panic-stricken widowhood, had fled back to her old home in Hampshire, she found all very much as she had left it, except that her father's hair was damply dyed, her sister Magdalen's frankly grey, and the pigtail of Bessie, the youngest daughter, was now an imposing bronze coil in the nape of her neck.
But if little else was radically changed in the old home except the hair of the family, nevertheless, the whole place had somehow declined and shrunk in Fay's eyes during the three years of her marriage.

The dear old gabled Tudor house, with its twisted chimneys, looked much the same from the outside, but within, in spite of its wealth of old pictures and cabinets and china, it had contracted the dim, melancholy aspect which is the result of prolonged scarcity of money.

Nothing had been spent on the place for years.

Magdalen seemed to have faded together with the curtains, and the darned carpets, and the bleached chintzes.
Colonel Bellairs alone, a handsome man of sixty, had remained remarkably young for his age.

The balance, however, was made even by the fact that those who lived with him grew old before their time.