is wife, sometimes avoiding her company for days at a time, and adopted
a stringently ascetic mode of life, denying himself all pleasure,
fasting frequently, and praying and meditating for hours at a stretch
in the private chapel which was attached to Coverdale. As far as it was
possible, without actually entering a community, his existence resembled
that of a monk, and Diane came to believe that he had voluntarily vowed
himself to a certain form of penance and expiation for the marriage
which the bigotry of his nature had led him to regard as a sin.

His life only impinged upon his wife's in so far as the upbringing of
their child was concerned. He was unnecessarily severe with her, and,
since Diane opposed his strict ruling at every opportunity, Magda's
early life was passed in an atmosphere of fierce contradictions.

The child inherited her mother's beauty to the full, and, as she
developed, exhibited an extraordinary faculty for getting her own way.
Servants, playmates, and governesses all succumbed to the nameless charm
she possessed, while her mother and old Virginie frankly worshipped her.

The love of dancing was instinctive with her, and this, unknown to Hugh,
her mother cultivated assiduously, fostering in her everything that
was imaginative and delicately fanciful. Magda believed firmly in
the existence of fairies and regarded flowers as each possessed of
a separate entity with personal characteristics of its own. The
originality of the dances she invented for her own amusement was the
outcome.

But, side by side with this love of all that was beautiful, she absorbed
from her mother a certain sophisticated understanding of life which was
somewhat startling in one of her tender years, and this, too, betrayed
itself in her dancing. For it is an immutable law that everything--good,
bad, and indifferent--which lies in the soul of an artist ultimately
reveals itself in his work.

And Magda, inheriting the underlying ardour of her father's temperament
and the gutter-child's sharp sense of values which was her mother's
Latin Quarter garnering, at the age of eight danced, with all the
beguilement and seductiveness of a trained and experienced dancer.

Even Hugh himself was not proof against the elusive lure of it. He
chanced upon her one day, dancing in her nursery, and was so carried
away by the charm of the performance that for the moment he forgot that
she was transgressing one of his most rigid rules.

In