concerned, and never to allude to it,
either for "fear or favour," again.

IV

INTRODUCES THE READER TO MRS. WILDER IN A SECRETIVE MOOD

Draycott Wilder was a man who hoarded his passions and concentrated them
upon a very few objects. His work came first, and his intense ambition,
and after his work, his wife. She was the right sort of wife for a man
who put worldly success first, and through the years of their marriage
had helped him a great deal more than he ever admitted. Clarice Wilder
was beautiful, and had a surface cleverness combined with a natural gift
of tact that made her an admirable hostess. She could talk to anybody
and send them away pleased and satisfied with themselves, and she had
made the best of Draycott for a good number of years. She had married
him when marriage seemed a big thing and a wonderful thing, and her
country home in Devonshire a small, breathless place where nothing ever
happened, and where life was one long Sunday at Home, and Draycott, back
from the East, had appeared as interesting as a white Othello.

For a time she received all she needed out of life, and she threw
herself into her husband's promotion-hunger; understanding it, because
she, too, wanted to reign, and it gave her an inexplicable feeling of
respect for him, for Clarice knew that had she been born a man, she,
too, would have worked and schemed and pushed herself out into the front
of the ranks. She combined with him as only an ambitious woman can
combine, and she supplied all he lacked. It filled her mind, and she
never awoke the jealousy that lay like a sleeping python in the heart of
Draycott Wilder. It was when they were in India that Clarice, for the
first time, lost her grip and allowed her senses to get the better of
her common sense, and she became for a brief time a woman with a very
troublesome heart. Hector Copplestone, a young man newly come to the
Indian Civil Service, was sent to their Punjaub station. He made Mrs.
Wilder realize her own charm, he made her terribly conscious that she
was older than him, he made her anxious and distracted and madly,
idiotically in love with him. She forgot that there were other things in
life, she put aside ambition for a stronger temptation, and she did not
care what Draycott thought or supposed.

No one ever knew what happened, but everyone guessed that Wilder had
made trouble. They left India under the same cloud of silence, and they
reappeared in Mangadone t