Strange’s horse had stood on a sharp stump hidden by the snow and had lamed himself, and they were both making the best of their way to the house. It was bad going, the fluttering snow kept constantly balling in Lorraine’s hoofs. Any attempt at hurry was out of the question, so Strange’s thoughts turned, as they always did in any unhurried moment, on his wife, and the puzzle they were both dissecting.

“There is one thing,” he said with a laugh, “we are not likely to pall on one another in a hurry, there is nothing in the least mawkish in our relations, and we are both of us good-humoured. That half-amused malice in her radiant face whenever she catches me watching her!—Was there ever before such radiance in any woman’s face? This wife of mine is superb, and yet I haven’t an atom of claim to her, except from the law’s brutal point of view. But the mistake was mine, I thought it was in all women to be taught to love, given a decent education, but it seems there are some who want a special dispensation to get it driven into them. What a mystery the whole thing is! And you try to do your duty, my poor little girl, groping blindly in the cold outer air of ignorance, and you think I know nothing of your unrest and your wild endeavours! How little you know after all, with all your big brain! Hallo, there you are—yourself, on the top of the fence, with your hair flying! What hair it is! If you were anyone else,” he shouted, “I should see visions of colds and swollen noses; you can laugh and dare anything. Have you been long out?”

She came up panting.

“Since two o’clock. I had no idea I could be moved to enthusiasm for this part of the world. But this storm has rummaged out every latent spark in me. Look at those pines fighting the wind! Oh, oh, my hat!”

“Hold Lorraine, I’ll catch it.”

Gwen laughed gaily as she watched the chase. At first it was even betting between the two, but in the end Strange brought it back in triumph.

“You can’t catch cold, but don’t you think the dignity of your position in the county demands a hat?”

“If it wants a hat as disreputable as this to prop itself up with, it can’t be up to much! By the way, what a united couple the servants will think us, what a striking picture of easy affection!”

Strange laughed, but his wife could have bitten out her tongue. After getting nearly frozen to the fence in her zeal to map out her duty, this to be the outcome of it all!

She began to speak quickly, and her voice had a curious new little note in it that interested her husband, and made him turn his eyes on her more than once. But she was talking too fast to notice him, then she had the wind to fight. Besides all this, wild ideas of touches and such like began to float about her brain in rather a frantic way.

She brought herself to reason with a shake, fortunately perhaps, the time being hardly fitting to launch out on any new line.

When Gwen was coming down to tea in a wonderful gown of white velvet with slashes of crocus yellow, she met Tolly, now the valet’s young man, carrying off an armful of Strange’s wet clothes. By some sudden impulse she stopped and accosted him.

“I hope you will be happy here,” she said, if the truth must be told, in rather a shy way, the experience was so new and shocking.

“You must try to keep away from gin,” she added sagely, “and then you will be sure to get on well. I know your master wants you to.”

Tolly gave a wild dab at his red mat of stubble, muttered inarticulately and fled.

“Oh, what made me do it, what? That horror will haunt me for a week. What is Humphrey made of that he can endure the constant sight of him? And now I remember, Mrs. Fellowes told me one day, he nursed that awful thing for three weeks once, because it whimpered at the thought of a hospital. Imagine that mouth, that nose, that ghastly whole, in delirium, oh imagine the mere touch of those flabby paws with their great red knobs—those knobs fascinated me and, ugh! they have got into my eyes! Without doubt I have a remarkable man for a husband! I wish, oh, I wish I had my tea, I am dying for it, I think I must be tired.”

She sank down into a big chair and put her feet out to catch the heat, then she put her hands up and set to to rub her eyes, in a foolish futile effort to clear her whirling brain, and then Strange and the tea came in.

“I have seen Tolly,” she said, giving him some tea.

“In that gown?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, that’s good, it may awaken some sense of religion in the beggar. I have experimented on him with every variety of church, and with a most mixed assortment of parsons, without the slightest effect, but there is a certain divinity about you in that gown that may appeal to the fellow—be the thin edge of the wedge, and lead to higher things. It would be a new rÔle for you to pose in, Gwen, as an instrument of grace.”

“I think I should do better as an instrument of wrath,” she said, with rather a strained smile; she felt a sudden impulse of loathing against what Strange called her “divinity.”

“It is one of the things which keeps me so remote, so absolutely aloof,” she thought hurriedly, “what do women want with divinity or any other superhuman attribute? I believe Rossetti must have thought of me for his ‘Lilith’.”

She stood up half absently and looked into a mirror near at hand, then she moved away suddenly with sneering lips and a quick flush.

“That’s not the fire!” her husband thought, “Oh Lord, what’s up now?”

After a few minutes she went slowly over to the piano, and began to play in a vague fitful way. Her husband dropped the paper he had taken up, and listened. It struck him that her playing had altered, it used to be mechanical and rather expressionless, no one could accuse it of want of expression to-night, even if the expression did limit itself to anger and unrest.

After a time she stopped playing, with one dissatisfied, disordered chord, then there was a little pause which she broke by singing, first softly and half humming, then she seemed to awaken with a start, and she sang on, song after song, with a sort of excited vehemence. Her voice was a low contralto, there was not a sharp nor a hard tone in it, but there were some strong harsh ones, like the groans of men, and some deep guttural ones, like the sighs of women; there was no passion in her voice, but it was full of consuming soft tumults of vague sad unrest.

“This is rather a pleasanter modification of her first storms!” thought Strange. “What possibilities there are in that voice, I wonder what would happen if I went over and tried to kiss that dead woman into life! Pygmalion’s task was a fool to mine, what’s marble to an undeveloped woman!”

He stood behind her and joined in with her song, his bass to her contralto. The combination gave one rather a shock at first, but it grew fascinating as they went on.

Gwen stopped suddenly in the middle of a song.

“I could not have believed our two voices could ever mix and make completeness.”

“It is a ‘sport’.”

“I like explicable things best,” she said, peering out into the semi-gloom.

“You go about with a scalpel in your brain, Gwen! What a thing it is to come of scientific stock!”

“Oh, it’s a diabolical thing for a woman!” said Gwen.

She shut the piano up softly—she never by any chance banged things—and went upstairs to dress.

“I shall wear that silk that looks like flesh,” she said.

“I put it away your ladyship, you said you did not like it.”

“If you could get at it quite easily, I should like to wear it to-night.”

“That dress suggests good sound flesh and blood, with no remote divinity about it,” she thought. “Oh, I wish I could let things be, and stop poking about among mysteries. I will touch him to-night, yes, I will. I wonder—I wonder—if I can possibly muster up strength for a kiss.”