hile the breath
from the horses' nostrils rose into it as defiant jets of steam, that
struggled momentarily with the opaque, all-enveloping vapour, only to
be absorbed and obliterated as light by darkness, or life by death.

The aspect presented by nature was sinister, had Richard Calmady been
sufficiently at leisure to observe it in detail. But, as he slowly
walked the horses up and down the quarter of a mile of woodland drive,
leading from the thatched lodge on the right of the Westchurch road to
the house, he was not at leisure. He had received enlightenment on many
subjects. He had acquired startling impressions, and he needed to place
these, to bring them into line with the general habit of his thought.
The majority of educated persons--so-called--think in words, words
often arbitrary and inaccurate enough, prolific mothers of mental
confusion. The minority, and those of by no means contemptible
intellectual calibre,--since the symbol must count for more than the
mere label,--think in images and pictures. Dickie belonged to the
minority. And it must be conceded that his mind now projected against
that shifting, impalpable background of fog, a series of pictures which
in their cynical pathos, their suggestions at once voluptuous and
degraded, were hardly unworthy of the great master, William Hogarth,
himself.

For Helen, in the reaction and relief caused by finding her relation to
Richard unimpaired, caused too by that joyous devilry resident in her
and constantly demanding an object on which to wreak its derision, had
by no means spared her lord and master, Angelo Luigi Francesco, Vicomte
de Vallorbes. And this only son of a thrifty, hard-bitten, Savoyard
banker-noble and a Neopolitan princess of easy morals and ancient
lineage, this Parisian _viveur_, his intrigues, his jealousies, his
practical ungodliness and underlying superstition, his outbursts of
temper, his shrewd economy in respect of others, and extensive personal
extravagance, offered fit theme, with aid of little romancing, for such
a discourse as it just now suited his very brilliant, young wife to
pronounce.

The said discourse opened in a low key, broken by pauses, by tactful
self-accusations, by questionings as to whether it were not more
merciful, more loyal, to leave this or that untold. But as she
proceeded, not only did Helen suffer the seductions of the fine art of
lying, but she really began to have some ado to keep her exuberant
sense of