ir to a
woman in revolt. She fell in love with an intensity befitting her true
temperament, and with a stubbornness that bore witness to the dreary
failure of her marriage. Marriott Dalrymple returned her love, and
nothing in his view of life predisposed him to put what probably
appeared to him a mere legality before the happiness of two people meant
for each other. There were no children of the Delaney marriage; and in
his belief the husband had enjoyed too long a companionship he had never
truly deserved.

So Lady Rose faced her husband, told him the truth, and left him. She
and Dalrymple went to live in Belgium, in a small country-house some
twenty or thirty miles from Brussels. They severed themselves from
England; they asked nothing more of English life. Lady Rose suffered
from the breach with her father, for Lord Lackington never saw her
again. And there was a young sister whom she had brought up, whose image
could often rouse in her a sense of loss that showed itself in
occasional spells of silence and tears. But substantially she never
repented what she had done, although Colonel Delaney made the penalties
of it as heavy as he could. Like Karennine in Tolstoy's great novel, he
refused to sue for a divorce, and for something of the same reasons.
Divorce was in itself impious, and sin should not be made easy. He was
at any time ready to take back his wife, so far as the protection of
his name and roof were concerned, should she penitently return to him.

So the child that was presently born to Lady Rose could not be
legitimized.

Sir Wilfrid stopped short at the Park end of Bruton Street, with a start
of memory.

"I saw it once! I remember now--perfectly."

And he went on to recall a bygone moment in the Brussels Gallery, when,
as he was standing before the great Quintin Matsys, he was accosted with
sudden careless familiarity by a thin, shabbily dressed man, in whose
dark distinction, made still more fantastic and conspicuous by the fever
and the emaciation of consumption, he recognized at once Marriott
Dalrymple.

He remembered certain fragments of their talk about the pictures--the
easy mastery, now brusque, now poetic, with which Dalrymple had shown
him the treasures of the gallery, in the manner of one whose learning
was merely the food of fancy, the stuff on which imagination and reverie
grew rich.

Then, suddenly, his own question--"And Lady Rose?"

And Dalrymple's quiet, "Very well. She'd see yo