“I was just like your father, my dear.  I never did no manner of harm to those people.  They used to think I thought myself better blood nor they were, but I never thought no such thing, I assure you.  Only when they turned nasty after my marriage I made up my mind—­just as your father did—­as Alma should marry a bigger husband nor any of them, even if he wasn’t worth a dime and ’adn’t a ’air on ’is ’ead.”

But even these revelations about herself were less humiliating than her sympathy with me, which implied that I was not fitted to be mistress of a noble house—­how could it be expected of me?—­whereas Alma was just as if she had been born to it, and therefore it was lucky for me that I had her there to show me how to do things.

“Alma’s gotten such ton! Such distangy manners!” she would say.

The effect of all this was to make me feel, as I had never felt before, the intolerable nature of the yoke I was living under.  When I looked into the future and saw nothing before me but years of this ignoble bondage, I told myself that nothing—­no sacrament or contract, no law of church or state—­could make me endure it.

From day to day my maid came to me with insidious hints about Alma and my husband.  I found myself listening to them.  I also found myself refreshing my memory of the hideous scene in Paris, and wondering why I had condoned the offence by staying an hour longer under my husband’s protection.

And then there was always another force at work within me—­my own secret passion.  Though sometimes I felt myself to be a wretched sinner and thought the burden I had to bear was heaven’s punishment for my guilty love, at other times my whole soul rose in revolt, and I cried out not merely for separation from my husband but for absolute sundering.

Twice during the painful period of the house-party I heard from Martin.  His first letter was full of accounts of the far-reaching work of his expedition—­the engaging of engineers, electricians, geologists and masons, and the shipping of great stores of wireless apparatus—­for his spirits seemed to be high, and life was full of good things for him.

His second letter told me that everything was finished, and he was to visit the island the next week, going first to “the old folks” and coming to me for a few days immediately before setting sail.

That brought matters to a head, and compelled me to take action.

It may have been weak of me, but not wanting a repetition of the scene with Father Dan, (knowing well that Martin would not bear it with the same patience) I sent the second letter to Alma, asking if the arrangement would be agreeable.  She returned it with the endorsement (scribbled in pencil across the face), “Certainly; anything to please you, dear.”

I submitted even to that.  Perhaps I was a poor-spirited thing, wanting in proper pride, but I had a feeling that it was not worth while to waste myself in little squibs of temper, because an eruption was coming (I was sure of that) in which Martin would be concerned on my side, and then everybody and everything would be swept out of the path of my life for ever.