while she could not
as yet bring herself to say them.

An unsatisfactory peace was patched up during the evening. But in the
dead of night Daphne sat up in bed, looking at the face and head of her
husband beside her on the pillow. He lay peacefully sleeping, the noble
outline of brow and features still nobler in the dim light which effaced
all the weaker, emptier touches. Daphne felt rising within her that
mingled passion of the jealous woman, which is half love, half hate, of
which she had felt the first stirrings in her early jealousy of Elsie
Maddison. It was the clutch of something racial and inherited--a
something which the Northerner hardly knows. She had felt it before on
one or two occasions, but not with this intensity. The grace of Chloe
Fairmile haunted her memory, and the perfection, the corrupt perfection
of her appeal to men, men like Roger.

[Illustration: "In the dead of night Daphne sat up in bed, looking at
the face and head of her husband beside her on the pillow."]

She must wring from him--she must and would--a much fuller history of
his engagement. And of those conversations in the garden, too. It stung
her to recollect that, after all, he had given her no account of them.
She had been sure they had not been ordinary conversations!--Mrs.
Fairmile was not the person to waste her time in chit-chat.

A gust of violence swept through her. She had given Roger
everything--money, ease, amusement. Where would he have been without
her? And his mother, too?--tiresome, obstructive woman! For the first
time that veil of the unspoken, that mist of loving illusion which
preserves all human relations, broke down between Daphne and her
marriage. Her thoughts dwelt, in a vulgar detail, on the money she had
settled upon Roger--on his tendencies to extravagance--his
happy-go-lucky self-confident ways. He would have been a pauper but for
her; but now that he had her money safe, without a word to her of his
previous engagement, he and Mrs. Fairmile might do as they pleased. The
heat and corrosion of this idea spread through her being, and the will
made no fight against it.

CHAPTER VII

"You're off to the meet?"

"I am. Look at the day!"

Chloe Fairmile, who was standing in her riding-habit at the window of
the Duchess's morning-room, turned to greet her hostess.

A mild November sun shone on the garden and the woods, and Chloe's
face--the more exquisite as a rule for its slight, strange
withering--