am descended from that woman, and you know how wicked she was."

Again the strange irritation stirred in the midst of Ian's pity.

"Wicked, darling! That's an absurd word to use."

"She left her husband. And it's awful that I, who can't understand how
any woman could be so wicked as to do that, should be so terribly like
her. I feel as though it had something to do with this appalling thing
happening to me. Perhaps her sins are being visited on me." She held the
lapels of his coat and looked tenderly, yearningly, in his face. "And I
could bear it better if--But oh, my Ian! I can't bear to think of you
left with something wicked, with some one who doesn't love you, who
deceives you, and--"

"Milly," he broke in, "I won't have you say things like that. They are
absolutely untrue, and I won't have them said."

There was a note of sternness in his voice that Milly had never heard
before, and she saw a hard look come into his averted face which was new
to her. When she spoke it was in a gasp.

"You love her? You love that wicked, bad woman so much you won't let me
tell you what she is?"

He drew himself away from her with a gesture, and in a minute answered
with cold deliberation:

"I cannot cease to love my own wife because--because she's not always
exactly the same."

They sat silent beside each other. At length Milly rose from the sofa.
The tinselled scarf, that other woman's delicate finery, had slipped
from the white beauty of her shoulders. She drew it around her again
slowly, and slowly with bowed head left the room.

CHAPTER XVIII

Between noon and one o'clock on a bright June morning there is no place
in the world quite so full of sunshine and summer as the quadrangle of
an Oxford College. Not Age but Youth of centuries smiles from gray walls
and aery pinnacles upon the joyous children of To-day. Youth, in a
bright-haired, black-winged-butterfly swarm, streams out of every dark
doorway, from the austere shade of study, to disport itself, two by two,
or in larger eddying groups, upon the worn gravel, even venturously
flits across the sacred green of the turf. There is an effervescence of
life in the clear air, and the sun-steeped walls of stone are resonant
with the cheerful noise of young voices. Here and there men already in
flannels pass towards the gate; Dons draped in the black folds of the
stately gown, stand chatting with their books under their arms; and
since the season of festivity has