no one could reasonably expect of a vagabond like himself—­these things presently transformed a woman in despair to a woman in revolt.  She fell in love with an intensity befitting her true temperament, and with a stubbornness that bore witness to the dreary failure of her marriage.  Marriott Dalrymple returned her love, and nothing in his view of life predisposed him to put what probably appeared to him a mere legality before the happiness of two people meant for each other.  There were no children of the Delaney marriage; and in his belief the husband had enjoyed too long a companionship he had never truly deserved.

So Lady Rose faced her husband, told him the truth, and left him.  She and Dalrymple went to live in Belgium, in a small country-house some twenty or thirty miles from Brussels.  They severed themselves from England; they asked nothing more of English life.  Lady Rose suffered from the breach with her father, for Lord Lackington never saw her again.  And there was a young sister whom she had brought up, whose image could often rouse in her a sense of loss that showed itself in occasional spells of silence and tears.  But substantially she never repented what she had done, although Colonel Delaney made the penalties of it as heavy as he could.  Like Karennine in Tolstoy’s great novel, he refused to sue for a divorce, and for something of the same reasons.  Divorce was in itself impious, and sin should not be made easy.  He was at any time ready to take back his wife, so far as the protection of his name and roof were concerned, should she penitently return to him.

So the child that was presently born to Lady Rose could not be legitimized.

Sir Wilfrid stopped short at the Park end of Bruton Street, with a start of memory.

“I saw it once!  I remember now—­perfectly.”

And he went on to recall a bygone moment in the Brussels Gallery, when, as he was standing before the great Quintin Matsys, he was accosted with sudden careless familiarity by a thin, shabbily dressed man, in whose dark distinction, made still more fantastic and conspicuous by the fever and the emaciation of consumption, he recognized at once Marriott Dalrymple.

He remembered certain fragments of their talk about the pictures—­the easy mastery, now brusque, now poetic, with which Dalrymple had shown him the treasures of the gallery, in the manner of one whose learning was merely the food of fancy, the stuff on which imagination and reverie grew rich.

Then, suddenly, his own question—­“And Lady Rose?”

And Dalrymple’s quiet, “Very well.  She’d see you, I think, if you want to come.  She has scarcely seen an English person in the last three years.”