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 and threw herself and her youthful unhappiness straight at the man who had not yet destroyed the picture that Nina found when she visited her brother’s rooms with the desire to be good to him with rocking-chairs!

Not that she really believed or feared that Philip would consider such an impossible reconciliation; pride, and a sense of the absurd, must always check any such weird caprice of her brother’s conscience; and yet—­and yet other amazing and mismated couples had done it—­had been reunited.

And Nina was mightily troubled, for Alixe’s capacity for mischief was boundless; and that she, in some manner, had already succeeded in stirring up Philip, was a rumour that persisted and would not be annihilated.