at a commonplace
fellow it was whom you thought a hero; it would have come. You must have
loved me out of the full flow of your own nature if I had not been
driven to cowardice and deception."

Evidently Madame Danterre had had a kind of almost uncanny power of
terrifying the soldier. He had been a good man when she first met him,
and he had been a good man after that short time of mad infatuation. He
was by nature and training almost passionately respectable; he was at
length happily married; but this horror of an evil incident in the past
had got such a hold on his nerves that when he met Madame Danterre (whom
he had believed to be dead) coming out of a theatre in London, the hero
of the Victoria Cross, of three other campaigns, perhaps the bravest
man in England, fainted when he saw her. Without doubt it was the
publication of Mr. John Steele's will leaving his enormous fortune to
Sir David Bright that had resuscitated Madame Danterre.

From the moment of that shock David Bright had probably never been
entirely sane on the subject. The resurrection of Madame Danterre had
seemed to him preternatural and fateful. The woman had become to him
something more or something less than human, something impervious to
attack that could not be dealt with in any ordinary way.

From that time there had grown up an invisible barrier between him and
his wife. He found himself making silly excuses for being out at quite
natural times. He found himself getting afraid of her, and building up
defences, growing reserved and absurdly dignified, trying to cling to
the pedestal of the elderly soldier as he could not be a companion.

Madame Danterre had gone back to Florence, fat with blackmail, and then
had begun a steady course of persecution.

Step by step he had sunk lower down, knowing that he was weakening his
own case most miserably if it should ever become public. Nothing
satisfied her, although she received two thousand a year regularly,
until the will was drawn up, which left everything to her except an
allowance of L800 a year to Rose.

Once a year for three years Madame Danterre had visited London, and had
generally contrived that Sir David should be conscious of the look in
her astonishing eyes, which Sir Edmund had likened to extinct volcanoes,
at some theatre, or in the park, once at least every season. Evidently
that look had never failed. It touched the exposed nerve in his
mind--exposed ever since the time of illness a