He found himself brought up forcibly once more against the inevitable consequences of his marriage with Diane, and reasoned that through his weakness in making such a woman his wife, he had let loose on the world a feminine thing dowered with the seductiveness of a Delilah and backed—­here came in the exaggerated family pride ingrained in him—­by all the added weight and influence of her social position as a Vallincourt.

“Never let me see you dance again, Magda,” he told her.  “It is forbidden.  If you disobey you will be severely punished.”

Magda regarded him curiously out of a pair of long dark eyes the colour of black smoke.  With that precociously sophisticated instinct of hers she realised that the man had been emotionally stirred, and divined in her funny child’s mind that it was her dancing which had so stirred him.  It gave her a curious sense of power.

“Sieur Hugh is afraid because he likes me to dance,” she told her mother, with an impish little grin of enjoyment.

(On one occasion Hugh had narrated for her benefit the history of an ancestor, one Sieur Hugues de Vallincourt, whose effigy in stone adorned the church, and she had ever afterwards persisted in referring to her father as “Sieur Hugh”—­considerably to his annoyance, since he regarded it as both disrespectful and unseemly.)

From this time onwards Magda seemed to take a diabolical delight in shocking her father—­experimenting on him, as it were.  In some mysterious way she had become conscious of her power to allure.  Young as she was, the instinct of conquest was awakened within her, and she proceeded to “experiment” on certain of her father’s friends—­to their huge delight and Hugh’s intense disgust.  Once, in an outburst of fury, he epitomised her ruthlessly.

“The child has the soul of a courtesan!”

If this were so, Hugh had no knowledge of how to cope with it.  His fulminations on the subject of dancing affected her not at all, and a few days after he had rebuked her with all the energy at his command he discovered her dancing on a table—­this time for the delectation of an enraptured butler and staff in the servants’ hall.

Without more ado Hugh lifted her down and carried her to his study, where he administered a sound smacking.  The result astonished him considerably.

“Do you think you can stop me from dancing by beating me?”

Magda arraigned him with passionate scorn.

“I do,” he returned grimly.  “If you hurt people enough you can stop them from committing sin.  That is the meaning of remedial punishment.”

“I don’t believe it!” she stormed at him.  “You might hurt me till I died of hurting, but you couldn’t make me good—­not if I hated your hurting me all the time!  Because it isn’t good to hate,” she added out of the depths of some instinctive wisdom.

“Then you’d better learn to like being punished—­if that will make you good,” retorted Hugh.