od, it seemed to him, his thoughts had clung about
that upstairs room where his wife lay battling for her own life and
another's. Suddenly they swung back to the time, a year ago, when he
had first met her--an elusive feminine thing still reckoning her age in
teens--beneath the glorious blue and gold canopy of the skies of Italy.

Their meeting and brief courtship had been pure romance--romance such
as is bred in that land of mellow warmth and colour, where the flower of
passion sometimes buds and blooms within the span of a single day.

In like manner had sprung to life the love between Hugh Vallincourt
and Diane Wielitzska, and rarely has the web of love enmeshed two more
dissimilar and ill-matched people--Hugh, a man of seven-and-thirty, the
strict and somewhat self-conscious head of a conspicuously devout old
English family, and Diane, a beautiful dancer of mixed origin, the
illegitimate offspring of a Russian grand-duke and of a French artist's
model of the Latin Quarter.

The three dread Sisters who determine the fate of men must have laughed
amongst themselves at such an obvious mismating, knowing well how
inevitably it would tangle the threads of many other lives than the two
immediately concerned.

Vallincourt had been brought up on severely conventional lines, reared
in the narrow tenets of a family whose salient characteristics were
an overweening pride of race and a religious zeal amounting almost to
fanaticism, while Diane had had no up-bringing worth speaking of. As for
religious views, she hadn't any.

Yet neither the one nor the other had counted in the scale when the
crucial moment came.

Perhaps it was by way of an ironical set-off against his environment
that Fate had dowered Hugh with his crop of ruddy hair--and with the
ardent temperament which usually accompanies the type. Be that as it
may, he was swept completely off his feet by the dancer's magic beauty.
The habits and training of a lifetime went by the board, and nothing
was allowed to impede the swift (not to say violent) course of his
love-making. Within a month from the day of their first meeting, he and
Diane were man and wife.

The consequences were almost inevitable, and Hugh found that his married
life speedily resolved itself into an endless struggle between the
dictates of inclination and conscience. Everything that was man in him
responded passionately to the appeal and charm of Diane's personality,
whilst everything that was