long in finding out that the little artist was both a poor judge and a bad agent.  Netta’s cheek always flamed when she thought of her father’s boastings and blunderings, and of the way in which Edmund had come to treat him.  And now the Smeath family were just as poor as ever again.  Her little sisters had scarcely a dress to their backs; and she was certain her mother was both half-starved and over-worked.  Edmund had not been at all kind to them since her marriage—­not at all!

How had he come to marry her?  She was well aware that it was an extraordinary proceeding on his part.  He was well born on both sides, and, by common report among the English residents in Florence, enormously rich, though his miserly habits had been very evident even in the first days of their acquaintance.  He might no doubt have married anybody he pleased; if he would only have taken the trouble.  But nothing would induce him to take any trouble—­socially.  He resented the demands and standards of his equals; turned his back entirely on normal English society at home and abroad; and preferred, it seemed, to live with his inferiors, where his manners might be as casual, and his dress as careless as he pleased.  The queer evenings and the queer people in their horrid little flat had really amused him.  Then he had been ill, and mama had nursed him; and she, Netta, had taken him a pot of carnations while he was still laid up; and so on.  She had been really pretty in those days; much prettier than she had ever been since the baby’s birth.  She had been attractive too, simply because she was young, healthy, talkative, and forthcoming; goaded always by the hope of marriage, and money, and escape from home.  His wooing had been of the most despotical and patronizing kind; not the kind that a proud girl would have put up with.  Still there had been wooing; a few presents; a frugal cheque for the trousseau; and a honeymoon fortnight at Sorrento.

Why had he done it?—­just for a whim?—­or to spite his English family, some member of which would occasionally turn up in Florence and try to put in claims upon him—­claims which infuriated him?  He was the most wilful and incalculable of men; caring nothing, apparently, one day for position and conventionality, and boasting extravagantly of his family and ancestors the next.

“He was rather fond of me—­for a little,” she thought to herself wearily, as she stood at the hall window, looking out into the rain.  At the point which things had now reached she knew very well that she meant nothing at all to him.  He would not beat her, or starve her, or even, perhaps, desert her.  Such behaviour would disturb his existence as much as hers; and he did not mean to be disturbed.  She might go her own way—­she and the child; he would give her food and lodging and clothes, of a sort, so long as she did not interfere with his tastes, or spend his money.

Then, suddenly, while she stood wrathfully pondering, a gust of anger rose—­childish anger, such as she had shown the night before, when she had tried to get out of the carriage.  She turned, ran down the corridor to the door which she understood was the door of his study—­and entered with a burst.