hanks to
the language in which she spoke, there was a play on the word--that word
which in French signifies woman as well as wife.

He stared at her, and uttered no word of answer, of understanding, in
response to her strange speech.

At one time, not lately, but many years ago, Claire had sometimes tried
his patience by the odd, unreasonable things she said, and once, stung
beyond bearing, he had told her so. Remembering those cold, measured
words of rebuke, she now caught with quick, exultant relief at the idea
that Jacques had not understood the half-confession wrung from her by
her sudden vision of his pain; and she swung back to a belief she had
always held till just now, the belief that he was dull--dull and
unperceptive.

With a nervous smile she turned again to her mirror, and then Jacques de
Wissant, with his wife's enigmatic words ringing in his ears, abruptly
left the room.

* * * * *

As if pursued by some baneful presence, he hastened through Claire's
beautiful boudoir, across the dining-room hung with the Gobelins
tapestries which his wife had brought him as part of her slender dower,
and so into the oval hall which formed the centre of the house.

And there Jacques de Wissant waited for a while, trying to still and to
co-ordinate his troubled thoughts and impressions.

Ah yes, he had understood--understood only too well Claire's strange,
ambiguous utterance! There are subtle, unbreathed temptations which all
men and all women, when tortured by jealousy, not only understand but
divine before they are actually in being.

Jacques de Wissant now believed that he was justified of the suspicions
of which he had been ashamed. His wife--moved by some obscure desire for
self-revelation to which he had had no clue--had flung at him the truth.

Yes, without doubt Claire could have made him happy--so little would
have contented his hunger for her--had she been one of those light women
of whom he sometimes heard, who go from their husbands' kisses to those
of their lovers.

But if he sometimes, nay, often heard of them, Jacques de Wissant knew
nothing of such women. The men of his race had known how to acquire
honest wives, aye, and keep them so. There had never been in the de
Wissant family any of those ugly scandals which stain other clans, and
which are remembered over generations in French provincial towns. Those
scandals which, if they provoke a laugh and cruel sneer whe