n her new position, she had
eagerly grasped at Milbanke's suggestion that they should visit the
scene of these excavations. But with this first essay, her interest in
discoveries had taken permanent flight.

The heat had been tremendous; the country parched and unsympathetic;
the associations terribly uncongenial. She remembered the first
morning, when she and Nance, stifling in their black dresses, had by
tacit consent stolen away from the party of fellow enthusiasts to which
Milbanke had attached himself; and climbing to the summit of a low,
olive-crowned hill, had sat tired, silent, and unutterably wretched,
looking out upon the arid land.

But that excursion had been the prelude to a new era. Visits to various
antiquities had succeeded each other with dull regularity, broken by
long, uneventful sojourns in the green seclusion of the villa at
Florence. Then the first break had occurred in the companionship of the
trio. Nance had been sent home to an English school.

Clodagh's acceptance of this fiat had been curiously interesting--as
had been her whole attitude towards Milbanke and his wishes. From the
day on which she recognised that the state of matrimony was something
irrevocably serious, she had taken upon herself an attitude of reserved
surrender that was difficult to analyse--difficult even to
superficially understand. By a strangely immature process of deduction,
she had satisfied herself that marriage was a state of bondage, more or
less distasteful as chance decreed--a state in which, by a fundamental
law of nature, submission and self-repression were the chief factors
necessary upon the woman's side.

As sometimes happens when there is a great disparity in years, the
wedded state had widened instead of lessening the gulf between Milbanke
and herself. It had cast a sudden, awkward restraint upon the affection
and respect that his actions had kindled in her mind, while inspiring
no new or ardent feelings to take its place. Ridiculously--and yet
naturally--her husband had become an infinitely more distant and
unapproachable being than her father's friend had been. And to this new
key she had, perforce, attuned her existence.

With a greater number of years--even with a little more worldly
experience--she might have made a vastly different business of her
life; for, at the time of his marriage, Milbanke had been hovering upon
the borderland of that fatuous love in which an old man can lose
himself so comp