The Goodwood of that year was a brilliant meeting. The winners were the horses that all the smart people wanted to win. The weather, with the exception of that first rainy twilight, was perfect, and all the smart frocks and hats spread themselves and unfolded their beauty to the sun, like flowers in a garden by the Lake of Como.

Among the owners of winning horses Mr. Rutherford was conspicuous.

"You rich people are always lucky," said his friends. "You never buy duffers, and you can afford to pay for talent. I don't suppose you make much by your luck, but you have the glory of it."

The house in which Claude Rutherford was staying was one of the smartest houses between Goodwood and Brighton, a house where there were always to be found clever men and handsome women—musical people and painting people, and even acting people—people who could sing and people who could talk; women who shone by the splendour of physical beauty, and women whose audacious wit made the delight of princes. It was a house in which cards were a secondary consideration, but where stakes were high and hours were late.

Lady Waterbury, the hostess, expressed poignant disappointment at Vera's non-arrival.

"My poor little wife is completely run down," Claude told her. "She was a rag this morning, and it would have been cruel to persuade her to come with me, though I hated leaving her in London at this dismal fag-end of the season. I thought her pal, Susan Amphlett, would have spent most of the week with her, but I hear Lady Susie is at the Saxemundhams'."

"Do you suppose Susie would miss a Goodwood—no, not for friendship," exclaimed Sir Joseph, the jovial host, one of the last of the private bankers of London, coming of a family so long established in wealth that he could look down upon new money. "Well, there is one of our beauties ruled out. I don't know what we should do if we hadn't secured Mrs. Bellenden."

"It was just as well to ask her this year," said his wife, with pinched lips, "though it was Sir Joseph's idea, not mine. I doubt if the best people will care about meeting her next season."

"What has Mrs. Bellenden done to risk her future status?" Claude asked, and then, with his cynical smile. "Certainly she has committed the unforgivable sin of being the handsomest woman in London, which is quite enough to set all the other women against her."

"It isn't her beauty that is the crime, but the use she makes of it. She has made more than one wife I know unhappy."

"And yet you ask her to your house?"

"Sir Joseph invites her. I only write the letter. So far she is just possible; but if I have any knowledge of character, she will be quite impossible before long."

"Let us make the most of her while her good days last," Claude said, laughing. "I should like to make a sketch of her before the brand of infamy is on her forehead. I have met her often, but my wife and she have not become allies; and if she is a snare for husbands and a peril for wives, it's rather lucky that Vera is not with me, for after a week in this delightful house they must have become pals."

"I don't think proximity would make two such women friends," Lady Waterbury replied severely. "Again, if I am any judge of character, I should say that Vera and Mrs. Bellenden must be utterly unsympathetic."

"My wife and I have a friendly compact," said Sir Joseph. "She may invite as many dowdy nieces and boring aunts as she likes, provided she asks no troublesome questions about the pretty women I want her to ask, and gives my nominees the best rooms."

"Poor Aunt Sophia had a mere dog-hole last Christmas," sighed Lady Waterbury.

"Well, didn't she bring her dog?"

"Poor darling; she never goes anywhere without Ponto: and, of course, she is a shade tiresome, and it is rather sweet of Joe to put up with her. Mrs. Bellenden may pass this time."

"Did I hear somebody talking of me?" cried a crystal clear voice, and a woman as lovely as a midsummer dawn came with swift step across the velvet turf towards the stone bench where Claude Rutherford and his host and hostess were seated.

They had strolled into the Italian garden, after an abundant tea that had welcomed the first batch of guests, a meal at which Mrs. Bellenden had not appeared, preferring to take tea in her dressing-room, while she watched her maid unpack, and planned the week's campaign; the exact occasion for every frock and hat being thought out as carefully as the general in command of an army might consider the position of his forces. It was to be a visit of five days and evenings, and none of those expensive garments which the maid was shaking out and smoothing down with lightly caressing fingers, was to be worn twice. All those forces had to be reviewed. Not a silk stocking not a satin slipper must be reported missing. Silken petticoats that rustled aggressively; petticoats of muslin and lace that were as soft and noiseless as the snow whose whiteness they imitated; fans, jewels, everything must be put away in perfect condition, ready for a lady who sometimes left herself the shortest possible time for an elaborate toilette, and yet always contrived to appear with faultless finish.

And this evening, as she came sailing across the garden, having changed her travelling clothes for a mauve muslin frock of such adorable simplicity that a curate's wife might have tried to copy it with the aid of a seamstress at eighteenpence a day, she was a vision of beauty that any hostess might have been proud to number among her guests.

She took her seat between Sir Joseph and his wife with careless grace, and held out her hand to Claude Rutherford without looking at him.

"Lady Waterbury told me that you and Mrs. Rutherford were to be here," she said. "Is she resting after her journey?"

"I am sorry to say she was not able to come with me."

"Not ill, I hope?"

"Not well enough for another Goodwood."

"The race weeks come round so quickly as one gets old," sighed Mrs. Bellenden. "There seems hardly breathing time between the Two Thousand and the Leger—and while one is thinking about where to go for the winter, another year has begun and people are motoring to Newmarket for the Craven."

"The story of our lives from year to year is rather like a merry-go-round in a fair, but Mrs. Bellenden is too young to feel the rush."

"Too young! I feel old, ages old. As old as Rider Haggard's Ayesha when the spell was broken and the enchantress changed to a hag. But I am sadly disappointed at not meeting your wife," she went on, turning the wonderful eyes that people talked about with full power upon Claude. "I wanted to meet her in a nice friendly house. We have only met in crowds, and I believe she rather hates me."

"How can you imagine anything so impossible?"

"At any rate, she has given me no sign of liking, while I admire her intensely. Francis Symeon has talked to me about her. I have had so much of the world, the flesh, and the devil, that I want to know something of a lady whom he calls one of his beautiful souls."

Upon this Mr. Rutherford had to say something polite, a something which implied that his wife would be charmed to see more of the lovely Mrs. Bellenden.

People talked of Mrs. Bellenden's beauty to her face. It was one of the things which her own sex registered against her as a mark of bad style. She might be ever so handsome, other women admitted, but she was the worst possible style. A circus rider, promoted from the sawdust to a Mayfair drawing-room, could hardly have been worse.

It was not long since this woman had burst upon the world of London—a revelation of physical loveliness.

There are planets and planets, as there are skies and skies. Assuredly neither Uranus nor Neptune created a greater ferment in the world of the wise than was made by Mrs. Bellenden's first season in the world of the foolish.

The phrase "professional beauty" had been exploded, as vulgar and stale, but the type remained under new names.

Mrs. Bellenden was simply the new beauty; invited everywhere; the star of every fashionable week-end party, every smart dance or dinner. Afternoon or evening—to hear divine music or to play ridiculous games; to be instructed about radium, or to lose money and temper at bridge, there could be no party really successful without Mrs. Bellenden.

Men looked round the flower-garden of picture hats with a disappointed air if her eyes did not flash lovely lightning from under one of them. Impetuous youths made a bee-line for her, and threaded the crowd with relentless elbows, calmly ignoring their loves of last season and the season before last.

"Men are absolute idiots about that woman," the last seasons told each other. "No one has a look in where she is."

Mrs. Bellenden was a young widow, a widow of two years' widowhood, the first of which it was whispered she had spent in a private lunatic asylum.

"That's where she got her complexion," said Malice. "It was just as good as a year's rest in a nursing home."

"And a strait-waistcoat. That's where she got her figure," said Envy.

She was now six-and-twenty, a widow, living in a small house in a narrow street like the neck of a bottle, between Park Lane and South Audley Street, with an income of two thousand a year, but popularly reputed to be spending at least five thousand. Her reputation in her first season had been unassailed, but she was rather taken upon trust, on the strength of the houses where she was met, than by reason of any exact knowledge that people had of her character and environment. Good-natured friends declared that she was thoroughbred. A creature with such exquisite hands and feet, and such a patrician turn of the swan-like throat, could hardly have come out of the gutter; and her husband had belonged to one of the oldest families in Wessex. So in that first season, except among her rivals in the beauty show, the general tone about her was approval.

Then, in her second year as the lovely widow, things began to leak out, unpleasant things—as to the men she knew, and the money she spent, the hours she kept in that snug little house in Brown Street; the places at which she was seen in London and Paris, chiefly in Paris, where people pretended that she had a pied-À-terre in the new quarter beyond St. GeneviÈve. People talked, but nothing was positively stated, except that she did curious things, and was beginning to be regarded somewhat shyly by prudish hostesses. She still went to a great many houses—smart houses and rich houses; but not quite the best houses, not the houses that can give a cachet, and stop the mouth of slander.

She gave little luncheons, little dinners, little suppers, in the little street out of Park Lane, and her lamp-lit drawing-room used to shine across the street in the small hours, as a token that there were talk and laughter and cards and music in the gay little room for tout le monde, or at least for her particular monde. She had a fine contralto voice, and sang French and Spanish ballads delightfully, could breathe such fire and passion into a song that the merest doggerel seemed inspired.

But before this second season was over there were a few people in London who had dreadful things to say about Mrs. Bellenden, and who said them with infinite cruelty; people for whose belongings—son or daughter, foolish youth or confiding young wife—this lovely widow had been a scourge.

Looking at the radiant being people did not always remember, and some people did not know, the tragedy of her youth. She had been a good woman once, quite good, a model wife. She had married, before her eighteenth birthday, a husband she adored. A creature of intense vitality, made of fire and light, sense and not mind, love with her had been a flame; unwise, unreasoning, exacting; love without thought; wildly adoring, wildly jealous. A word, a look given to another woman set her raging; and it was after one of the fierce quarrels that her jealous temper made only too frequent that her husband—handsome, gay, in the flower of his youth—left her without the goodbye kiss, for his last ride. He was brought back to her in the winter twilight, without a word of warning, killed at the last ditch in a point-to-point race, a race that was always remembered as the finest of many seasons; perhaps all the more vividly remembered because of that tragedy just before the finish, when Jim Bellenden broke his neck.

For some time after that dreadful night Kate Bellenden was under restraint; and then, after nearly a year, in which none but near relations had seen her or had even known where she was, she came back to the world; not quite sane, and desperately wicked. That small brain of hers had not been large enough to hold a great grief. Satan had taken possession of a mind that had never been rightly balanced.

"I have done with love," she told her Âme damnÉe. She had always her shadow and confidante, upon whom she lavished gifts and indulgences. "I can never love anybody after him: but I like to be loved, and I like to make it hard for my lovers."

And then, in still wickeder moods, she would say, "I like to steal a woman's husband, or to cut in between an engaged girl and the man she is to marry. I like to make another woman as desolate as I was after Jim was killed, but I can't make her quite as miserable. I am not Death. But," with a little exulting laugh, "I am almost as bad."

There were people—a mother, a sister, or a wife—here and there in the crowd we call Society, who thought Mrs. Bellenden worse than Death; people who knew the fortunes she had wasted, the houses she had ruined, the hearts she had broken, the careers she had blighted, and the souls that had been lost for her.