person."

Madame von Marwitz paused again, and again her eyes dwelt on Lady
Montgomery, whose pink feathers had given a sudden nod and then serenely
righted themselves. "I see," she then remarked. "But she is not
contented."

"Ah, come," said Gregory. "You can't shatter the conceit of a happy
husband so easily, Madame von Marwitz. You ask too much of me if you ask
me to believe that Karen makes confidences to you that she doesn't to
me. I can't take it on, you know," he continued to smile.

He had already felt that the loveliness of Madame von Marwitz's face was
a veil for its coldness, and hints had come to him that it masked, also,
some more sinister quality. And now, for a moment, as if a primeval
creature peeped at him from among delicate woodlands, a racial savagery
crossed her face with a strange, distorting tremor. The blood mounted to
her brow; her skin darkened curiously, and her eyes became hot and heavy
as though the very irises felt the glow.

"You do not accept my word, Mr. Jardine?" she said. Her voice was
controlled, but he had a disagreeable sensation of scorching, as though
a hot iron had been passed slowly before his face.

Gregory shook his foot a little, clasping his ankle. "I don't say that,
of course. But I'm glad to think you're mistaken."

"Let me tell you, Mr. Jardine," she returned, still with the curbed
elemental fury colouring her face and voice, "that even a happy
husband's conceit is no match for a mother's intuition. Karen is like my
child to me; and to its mother a child makes confidences that it is
unaware of making. Karen finds your world narrow; _borne_; it does not
afford her the wide life she has known."

"You mean," said Gregory, "the life she led with Mrs. Talcott?"

He had not meant to say it. If he had paused to think it over he would
have seen that it exposed him to her as consciously hostile and also as
almost feminine in his malice. And, as if this recognition of his false
move restored to her her full self-mastery, she met his irony with a
masculine sincerity, putting him, as on the occasion of their first
encounter, lamentably in the wrong. "Ah," she commented, her eyes
dwelling on him. "Ah, I see. You have wondered. You have criticized. You
have, I think, Mr. Jardine, misunderstood my life and its capacities.
Allow me to explain. Your wife is the creature dearest to me in the
world, and if you misread my devotion to her you endanger our relation.
You would not, I a