was turning over the pages of a volume of Browning when she entered;
and she had an instant to note the grace and manly dignity of his
figure, the poise of the intellectual head--the type of a perfect,
well-bred animal, with the accomplishment of a man of purpose and
executive design. A little frown of trouble came to her forehead, but
she drove it away with a merry laugh, as he turned at the rustle of her
skirts and came forward.

He noted her blue dress, he guessed the reason she had put it on; and
he made an inward comment of scorn. It was the same blue, and it was
near the same style of the dress she wore the last time he saw her. She
watched to see whether it made any impression on him, and was piqued to
observe that he who had in that far past always swept her with an
admiring, discriminating, and deferential glance, now only gave her
deference of a courteous but perfunctory kind. It made the note to all
she said and did that evening--the daring, the brilliance, the light
allusion to past scenes and happenings, the skilful comment on the
present, the joyous dominance of a position made supreme by beauty and
by gold; behind which were anger and bitterness, and wild and desperate
revolt.

For, if love was dead in him, and respect, and all that makes man's
association with woman worth while, humiliation and the sting of
punishment and penalty were alive in her, flaying her spirit, rousing
that mad streak which was in her grandfather, who had had many a
combat, the outcome of wild elements of passion in him. She was not
happy; she had never been happy since she married Rudyard Byng; yet she
had said to herself so often that she might have been at peace, in a
sense, had it not been for the letter which Ian Stafford had written
her, when she turned from him to the man she married.

The passionate resolve to compel him to reproach himself in soul for
his merciless, if subtle, indictment of her to bring him to the old
place where he had knelt in spirit so long ago--ah, it was so
long!--came to her. Self-indulgent and pitifully mean as she had been,
still this man had influenced her more than any other in the world--in
that region where the best of herself lay, the place to which her eyes
had turned always when she wanted a consoling hour. He belonged to her
realm of the imagination, of thought, of insight, of intellectual
passions and the desires of the soul. Far above any physical attraction
Ian had ever possessed fo