which the bride had brought for dowry. The lady, folk said,
would not surrender it to her husband; no matter how he stormed. _She_
was not of the kind that tamely submits, or cringes before a bully; on
the contrary, she ever gave back as good as she received. Finally,
things came at length to such a pitch, that the lady and her foreign
servants, it was said, at dead of night had secretly dug a great hole
somewhere in the huge vaulted dungeons of the castle, and had there
buried her gold and the rich jewels which now she hated as the cause of
her troubles.

Then, a little later, followed the climax--after violent scenes, Bryan
himself disappeared, as if to show that, the treasure being somewhere
beyond his ken, or out of his reach, he had no further use for the wife.
He might, no doubt, have resorted to poison, or to the knife, in order
to revenge himself; or he might have so made life a burden to her--as is
done sometimes, one is told, even by modern husbands--that she would
have been glad to lick his hand like a whipped spaniel, and to have
owned up, perhaps, to the place where she had hid the gold. But if he
killed her, her secret might die with her, or the servants who were in
her confidence might themselves secure the treasure. Again, she had
plenty of spirit, and, indeed, rather seemed to enjoy a fight, and it
was possible that bullying might not cause her to try to conciliate him
by revealing the whereabouts of the hidden treasure. So Bryan took the
course that he judged would make things the most unpleasant for his
wife, and which would at the same time rid him of her. He simply
disappeared.

And now the poor little lady, fierce enough in quarrel, and bitter
enough in tongue, was inconsolable. In spite of all--it is one of the
most inscrutable of the many inscrutable points in the nature of some
women--in spite of all, she had loved her great, strong, brutal,
bullying husband, and probably was only jealous of the gold because he
had showed too plainly that in his estimation it, and not she, came
first. Her days, unhappy enough before, were now spent in fruitless
misery, waiting for him who returned never again. A year and a day
passed, and still no tidings came to her of Bryan de Blenkinsopp. The
deserted wife could bear no longer her life in this alien country, and
she, too, with all her servants, went away. Folk, especially those who
had always in their hearts suspected her of being an imp of Satan, said
that