Ordham walked far out on the moor, then returned, not to the house, but to stroll up and down between the avenue of plane trees that connected it with the Italian garden. He finally threw himself down on a seat in his favourite spot. Above the glassy lake was a broken grey balustrade covered with mould and barely outlined against the stiff old cypresses beyond. In a dark grove on his right were marble seats, several noseless fauns and nymphs, the whole scene so reminiscent of Italy that his mind, always liable to peculiar deflections, experienced once more a sense of infidelity to Margarethe Styr: so often they had planned together that month in Italy which he had been the one to suggest, and this had been a favourite spot for making love to his bride.

He was too indolent to cherish anger for any great length of time, but resentment lingered, and since his talk with the doctor not only had it increased, but he felt that old sense of humiliation in not rising to an occasion. He had a hazy idea that young husbands always flew enraptured to worship their brides anew when informed that their ego had taken a fresh lease; but he felt anything but enraptured. Not only was he very much embarrassed, but, while shrinking from arranging the idea in words, he felt that Mabel, in her determination to press on to victory at any cost in this their first battle, had been indelicate in taking advantage of what could be little more than inference on the part of the doctor aided by her own canny suggestions. Wild horses would not have dragged such an admission from him until the last possible moment. How could she have talked it over with Cresswell—and, no doubt, with her maid? The ideal Mabel whom he had distractedly worshipped for one interminable fortnight had trembled more than once on her pedestal during the intimacy of the honeymoon, but it took this final conscious offence to sweep her off and leave her standing at the base, still beautiful, young, and fascinating, but for evermore bereft of illusion.

He resented, too, the sudden loss of that sense of pagan youth that he had enjoyed from the moment he had met Mabel in London, and which had been crushed but by no means extinguished during the fortnight of despair. He recalled the day in the Maximilianstrasse when he had ungratefully carped at fate for the undue allowance of women of the world that had fallen to his share. He had come into his inheritance soon after, and now he felt suddenly dispossessed. He had not the faintest desire to become a father; the very idea made him hot all over, then cold. Ten years hence would have been time enough; for the matter of that, nothing short of a plague could exterminate his family.

It is probable that to-day he had for the first time something more than a glimpse of the depth and vigour of his egoism, which, heretofore, polite even to himself, he had ignored. At all events, he realized that unconsciously he had for years been planning an existence into which the commonplace and material should as little obtrude as was possible on this mortal plane; he became aware that one of Mabel’s salient attractions had been her ability to help him to achieve this ideal existence with as little trouble to himself as possible. Now that his career was peremptorily postponed, he wanted it more than ever, and not for the services he might be able to render to his country—he admitted this brutally—but that he might live in the congenial atmosphere of Continental and diplomatic life, the while he dwelt in a romantic and splendid old palace with his lovely bride. He wanted to buy beautiful things every day in the treasure-house of Europe. His searching analytical mind craved the constant refreshment of new peoples, with their strange............