the child's gracious, alluring gestures he was reminded of the first
time that he had seen her mother dance, and of how it had thrilled him.
Beneath the veneer with which his self-enforced austerity had overlaid
his emotions, he felt his pulses leap, and was bitterly chagrined at
being thus attracted.

He found himself brought up forcibly once more against the inevitable
consequences of his marriage with Diane, and reasoned that through his
weakness in making such a woman his wife, he had let loose on the
world a feminine thing dowered with the seductiveness of a Delilah and
backed--here came in the exaggerated family pride ingrained in
him--by all the added weight and influence of her social position as a
Vallincourt.

"Never let me see you dance again, Magda," he told her. "It is
forbidden. If you disobey you will be severely punished."

Magda regarded him curiously out of a pair of long dark eyes the colour
of black smoke. With that precociously sophisticated instinct of hers
she realised that the man had been emotionally stirred, and divined in
her funny child's mind that it was her dancing which had so stirred him.
It gave her a curious sense of power.

"Sieur Hugh is _afraid_ because he likes me to dance," she told her
mother, with an impish little grin of enjoyment.

(On one occasion Hugh had narrated for her benefit the history of an
ancestor, one Sieur Hugues de Vallincourt, whose effigy in stone adorned
the church, and she had ever afterwards persisted in referring to her
father as "Sieur Hugh"--considerably to his annoyance, since he regarded
it as both disrespectful and unseemly.)

From this time onwards Magda seemed to take a diabolical delight
in shocking her father--experimenting on him, as it were. In some
mysterious way she had become conscious of her power to allure. Young
as she was, the instinct of conquest was awakened within her, and she
proceeded to "experiment" on certain of her father's friends--to their
huge delight and Hugh's intense disgust. Once, in an outburst of fury,
he epitomised her ruthlessly.

"The child has the soul of a courtesan!"

If this were so, Hugh had no knowledge of how to cope with it. His
fulminations on the subject of dancing affected her not at all, and a
few days after he had rebuked her with all the energy at his command he
discovered her dancing on a table--this time for the delectation of an
enraptured butler and staff in the servants' hall.

Without more