ware that she had played her best card prematurely; forced
by Rosamund, who had just told her that rumour continued to be very busy
coupling her brother's name with the name of the woman who once had been
his wife.

Nina was now thoroughly convinced of Alixe's unusual capacity for making
mischief.

She had known Alixe always--and she had seen her develop from a
talented, restless, erratic, emotional girl, easily moved to generosity,
into an impulsive woman, reckless to the point of ruthlessness when
ennui and unhappiness stampeded her; a woman not deliberately selfish,
not wittingly immoral, for she lacked the passion which her emotion was
sometimes mistaken for; and she was kind by instinct.

Sufficiently intelligent to suffer from the lack of it in others,
cultured to the point of recognising culture, her dangerous unsoundness
lay in her utter lack of mental stamina when conditions became
unpleasant beyond her will, not her ability to endure them.

The consequences of her own errors she refused to be burdened with; to
escape somehow, was her paramount impulse, and she always tried to--had
always attempted it even in school-days--and farther back when Nina
first remembered her as a thin, eager, restless little girl scampering
from one scrape into another at full speed. Even in those days there
were moments when Nina believed her to be actually irrational, but there
was every reason not to say so to the heedless scatterbrain whose
father, in the prime of life, sat all day in his room, his faded eyes
fixed wistfully on the childish toys which his attendant brought to him
from his daughter's nursery.

All this Nina was remembering; and again she wondered bitterly at
Alixe's treatment of her brother, and what explanation there could ever
be for it--except one.

Lately, too, Alixe had scarcely been at pains to conceal her contempt
for her husband, if what Rosamund related was true. It was only one more
headlong scrape, this second marriage, and Nina knew Alixe well enough
to expect the usual stampede toward that gay phantom which was always
beckoning onward to promised happiness--that goal of heart's desire
already lying so far behind her--and farther still for every step her
little flying feet were taking in the oldest, the vainest, the most
hopeless chase in the world--the headlong hunt for happiness.

And if that blind hunt should lead once more toward Selwyn? Suppose,
freed from Ruthven, she turned in her tracks