o listen to his complaints. She perceived very early the
little rift between husband and wife which might be bridged by love or
might become an abyss in which love would be for ever lost. It must,
however, be noted to her credit that she avoided any word likely to
widen it. She did not like Denasia, but she had a controlling sense
of honour. She had also a lofty ideal of the sacredness of the
marriage tie. To have made trouble between a man and his wife would,
in Elizabeth's opinion, have been as wicked a thing as to break into a
church vestry and steal the sacramental silver. But she did sympathize
with her brother, and advise him, and send him money. And naturally
Denasia, who thought badly of Elizabeth, resented her interference in
her life at all; so that there was usually a coolness between Roland
and Denasia after the arrival of a letter from Burrell Court.

In truth, any letter from St. Penfer at this period of Denasia's life
hurt her. She longed for her own people. She felt heart-sick for a
word from them. In some moment of confidence or ill-temper, Roland had
given his wife his own version of the visit to his mother-in-law. And
whatever else he remembered or forgot, he was clear and positive about
Joan's message to her daughter. She had broken her good father's life
in two and her mother was sorry she had ever given her suck. Denasia
knew her mother's passionate nature, and she could understand that
some powerful aggravation had made her speak so strongly, but the
words, after all allowances, were terrible words. They haunted her in
the midst of her professional excitements, and still more in the
solitude of her frequently restless nights.

And if Joan had felt this a year ago, Denasia knew that she now felt
much more bitterly; for in one of her letters to Roland Elizabeth had
written freely of the passionate anger of John Penelles when he
learned that his daughter had become a public dancer. Indeed,
Elizabeth affected to think it very cruel of Denasia to send to her
old ignorant parents the illustrated paper which contained her picture
in the dance act. She thought Denasia's vanity had overstepped all
bounds and become positive cruelty, etc., etc. And Denasia, in a
passion which matched any outbreak of her father's, vowed not only
that she had never sent such a paper to St. Penfer, but that Elizabeth
herself must have been the perpetrator of the cruelty, unless--and she
then gave Roland a glance which made hi