ed, "_Mon ami_, you cannot
expect to get perfection, even for our Jacques!" And Claire, so he now
admitted unwillingly to himself, had never troubled him overmuch with
her love of music....

He knocked twice, sharply, on his wife's door.

The song broke short with an almost cruel suddenness, and yet there
followed a perceptible pause before he heard her say, "Come in."

And then, as Jacques de Wissant slowly turned the handle of the door, he
saw his wife, Claire, before she saw him. He had a vision, that is, of
her as she appeared when she believed herself to be, if not alone, then
in sight of eyes that were indifferent, unwatchful. But Jacques' eyes,
which his wife's widowed sister, the frivolous Parisienne, Madeleine
Baudoin, had once unkindly compared to fishes' eyes, were now filled
with a watchful, suspicious light which gave a tragic mask to his
pallid, plain-featured face.

Claire de Wissant was standing before a long, narrow mirror placed at
right angles to a window looking straight out to sea. Her short, narrow,
dark blue skirt and long blue silk jersey silhouetted her slender
figure, the figure which remained so supple, so--so girlish, in spite of
her nine-year-old daughters. There was something shy and wild, untamed
and yet beckoning, in the oval face now drawn with pain and
sleeplessness, in the grey, almond-shaped eyes reddened with secret
tears, and in the firm, delicately modelled mouth.

She was engaged in tucking up her dark, curling hair under a grey
yachting cap, and, for a few moments, she neither spoke nor looked round
to see who was standing framed in the door. But when, at last, she
turned away from the mirror and saw her husband, the colour, rushing
into her pale face, caused an unbecoming flush to cover it.

"I thought it was one of the children," she said, a little breathlessly.
And then she waited, assuming, or so Jacques thought, an air at once of
patience and of surprise which sharply angered him.

Then her look of strain, nay, of positive illness, gave him an uneasy
twinge of discomfort. Could it be anxiety concerning her second sister,
Marie-Anne, who, married to an Italian officer, was now ill of scarlet
fever at Mantua? Two days ago Claire had begged very earnestly to be
allowed to go and nurse Marie-Anne. But he, Jacques, had refused, not
unkindly, but quite firmly. Claire's duty of course lay at Falaise, with
her husband and children; not at Mantua, with her sister.

Suddenly