to exhale a sort of perfume of culture, as if she were in
herself the most perfect product of a whole civilization.

Wyvis had been in many drawing-rooms and known many women, more or less
intimately, but he had never, in all his purposeless Bohemian life, come
across exactly this type of woman--a type in which refinement counts for
more than beauty, culture for more than grace. With a sudden leap of
memory, he recalled some scenes of which he had been witness years
before, when a woman, hot, red, excited with wine and with furious
jealousy, had reviled him in the coarsest terms, had struck him in the
face and had spat out foul and vindictive words of abuse. That
woman--ah, that woman was his wife--had been for many years to him the
type of what women must always be when stripped of the veneer of
society's restraints. Janetta had of late shaken his conviction on this
point; it was reserved for Margaret Adair to shatter it to the winds.

She looked so fair, so dainty, so delicate--he would have been a marvel
amongst men who believed that her body was anything but "an index to a
most fair mind"--that Wyvis said to himself that he had never seen any
woman like her. He was fascinated and enthralled. The qualities which
made her so different from his timid, underbred, melancholy mother, or
his coarse and self-indulgent wife, were those in which Margaret showed
peculiar excellence. And before these--for the first time in his
life--Wyvis Brand fell down and worshipped.

It was unfortunate; it was wrong; but it was one of those things that
will happen sometimes in everyday life. Wyvis was separated from his
wife, and hated as much as he despised her. Almost without knowing what
he did, he laid his whole heart and soul, suddenly and unthinkingly, at
Margaret's feet. And Margaret, smiling and serene, utterly ignorant of
his past, and not averse to a little romance that might end more
flatteringly than Sir Philip's attentions had done, was quite ready to
accept the gift.

Before Janetta had bound up Julian's hand, and made some fresh tea,
which she was obliged to carry upstairs herself, Mr. Brand had obtained
information from Margaret as to the day and hour on which she was likely
to come to Janetta for her singing-lesson, and also as to several of her
habits in the matter of walks and drives. Margaret gave the information
innocently enough; Wyvis had no direct purpose in extracting it; but the
attraction which the two felt to