There flitted before her the image of the girl of eighteen--muse of laughter and delight.

And she recalled the taciturn woman whom she had seen on her sofa the night before, speaking coldly, in dry, sharp sentences, to her husband, her cousin, her maid--evidently unhappy and in pain.
Eugenie shaded her eyes from the light of the terrace.

Her heart seemed to be sinking, contracting.

Mrs.Welby had been already ill, and therewith jealous and tyrannical, for some little time before Madame de Pastourelles had been summoned to the death-bed of her husband! But now!--Eugenie shrank aghast before what she saw and what she guessed.
And it was, too, as if the present state of things--as if the new hardness in Elsie's eyes, and the strange hostility of her manner, especially towards the Findons, and her cousin Eugenie--threw light on earlier years, on many a puzzling trait and incident of the past.
There had been a terrible confinement, at the end of years of childlessness--a still-born child--and then, after a short apparent recovery, a rapid loss of strength and power.

Poor, poor Elsie! But why--why should this trouble have awakened in her this dumb tyranny towards Arthur, this alienation from Arthur's friends?
Eugenie sharply drew herself together.