have known!"

Jenny hesitated. She was obviously embarrassed. She even shifted, like
an awkward child, in her chair. But there was something of obstinate
honesty in her that would have its way.

"If you must know,--I mean, if you care to know, please," she said at
length, "the most interesting person I ever met was--yes, I suppose he
was a wicked man."

Her curious, sharp-featured, yet attractive, face was hot all over as
she finished. Catherine divined at once that she was speaking of the
person who, according to Mrs. Ardagh, had wished "to lead her to the
devil." At this moment, while the two girls were silent, Mrs. Ardagh
returned to the room. As Catherine left it she heard the soft and high
voice of Jenny taking up once more the parable of the highly-honoured
divine.

Catherine was not altogether sorry when she and her husband left Eaton
Square for the house in Surrey which Mark had rented for the summer
months.

In this house the young couple were to face for the first time the
reality of married life. Hitherto they had only faced its romance.

The house was beautiful in an old-fashioned way. Its rooms were low and
rather dark. A wood stood round it. The garden was a wild clearing,
fringed with enormous clumps of rhododendron. Wood doves cooed in the
trees like invisible lovers unable to cease from gushing. Under the
trees ferns grew in masses. Squirrels swarmed, and in the huge
rhododendron flowers the bees lost themselves in an ecstasy of sipping
sensuality. It was a fine summer, and this house was made to be a summer
house. In winter it must have been but a dreary hermitage.

The servants greeted them respectfully. The horses neighed in the
stables. The dogs barked, and leaped up in welcome, then, when they were
noticed and patted, depressed their backs in joyous humility, and,
lifting their flexible lips, grinned amorously, glancing sideways from
the hands that they desired. It was an eminently unvulgar, and ought to
have been a very sweet, home-coming.

But was it sweet to Catherine?

She asked herself that question, and the fact that she did so proved
that it was not wholly sweet. Already the future oppressed her. In this
house, which seemed full of the smell of the country, of the very odour
of peace, she felt that the stranger, the second Mark--scarcely known to
her as yet--was to be born, was to gain strength and grow. She feared
him. She watched for him. But, for the first few days, he did not