A little woman with a furtive face, sharp nose, and blinking eyes was seated at one end of the kitchen table with playing-cards spread out in front of her.  She looked up at the sound of the opening door, and fear crept into her eyes.  She was Thalassa’s wife, but the relationship was so completely ignored by Thalassa that other people were apt to forget its existence.  The couple did the work of Flint House between them, but apart from that common interest Thalassa gave his wife very little of his attention, leading a solitary morose life, eating and sleeping alone, and holding no converse with her apart from what was necessary for the management of the house.

How he had ever come to bend his neck to the matrimonial yoke was one of those mysteries which must be accounted a triumph for the pursuing sex—­a tribute to the fearlessness of woman in the ardour of the chase.  On no other hypothesis was it possible to understand how such a feeble specimen of womanhood had been able to bring down such an untoward specimen of the masculine brute.  Outwardly, Thalassa had more kinship with a pirate than a husband.  There was that in his swart eagle visage and moody eyes which suggested lawless cruises, untrammelled adventure, and the fierce wooing of brown women by tropic seas rather than the dull routine of married life.  As a husband he was an anomaly like a caged macaw in a spinster’s drawing-room.

Mrs. Thalassa’s victory had ended with bringing him down, and she soon had cause to regret her temerity in marrying him.  Thalassa repaid the indignity of capture by a course of treatment which had long since subdued his wife to a state of perpetual fear of him—­a fear which deepened into speechless shaking horror when he stormed out at her in one of his black rages.  Some women would have taken to drink, others to religion.  Mrs. Thalassa sought consolation in two packs of diminutive and dog-eared cards.  Her shattered spirit found something inexpressibly soothing in the intricacies of patience:  in the patchwork of colour, the array of sequences, the sudden discovery of an overlooked move, the dear triumph of a hard-won game.

It was thus she was occupied now, shuffling, cutting, and laying out her rows with quick nervous movements of her worn little hands.  She glanced once more at her husband as he entered, and then bent over her cards again.

The night had descended blackly, and the wind moaned eerily round the old house.  Thalassa sat in a straight-backed wooden chair listening to the wind and rain raging outside, and occasionally glancing at his wife, who remained absorbed in her patience.  Half an hour passed in silence, broken only by the rattling of rain on the window, and the loud ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece.  Suddenly the bell of Robert Turold’s room rang loudly in its place behind the kitchen door.

It was one of the old wired bells, and it sprang backwards and forwards so violently under the impulse of the unseen pull that the other bells ranged alongside responded to the vibration by oscillating in sympathy.