It was very ridiculous, I did not then understand why it should be so, but the tears came gushing into my eyes while the doctor spoke, and it was as much as I could do to preserve my composure.

What interpretation my husband put upon my emotion I do not know, but I saw that his face darkened, and when the doctor turned to him to ask if he also knew Martin he answered curtly and brusquely,

“Not I. No loss either, I should say.”

“No loss?” said the doctor.  “Show me the man under the stars of God that’s fit to hold a candle to Martin Conrad, and by the angel Gabriel I’ll go fifty miles out of my way to put a sight on him.”

More than ever after this talk about Martin Conrad I was feeling defenceless, and at the mercy of my husband’s wishes and whims, when something happened which seemed to change his character altogether.

The third day out, on a bright and quiet morning, we called at Malta, and while my husband went ashore to visit some friends in the garrison, I sat on deck watching the life of the little port and looking at the big warships anchored in the bay.

A Maltese woman came on board to sell souvenirs of the island, and picking out of her tray a tiny twisted thing in coral, I asked what it was.

“That’s a charm, my lady,” said the woman.

“A charm for what?”

“To make my lady’s husband love her.”

I felt my face becoming crimson, but my heart was sore, so in my simplicity I bought the charm and was smuggling it into my bag when I became aware that one of my fellow-passengers, a lady, was looking down at me.

She was a tall, singularly handsome woman, fashionably and (although on shipboard) almost sumptuously dressed.  A look in her face was haunting me with a memory I could not fix when she stooped and said: 

“Aren’t you Mary O’Neill?”

The voice completed the identification, and I knew who it was.  It was Alma Lier.

She was now about seven-and-twenty and in the prime of her young womanhood.  Her beautiful auburn hair lay low over her broad forehead, almost descending to her long sable-coloured eyebrows.  Her cheeks were very white, (rather beyond the whiteness of nature, I thought), and her lips were more than commonly red, with the upper one a little thin and the lower slightly set forward.  But her eyes were still her distinguishing feature, being larger and blacker than before and having that vivid gaze that looked through and through you and made you feel that few women and no man in the world would have the power to resist her.

Her movements were almost noiseless, and as she sank into the chair by my side there was a certain over-sweetness in the soft succulent tones of the voice with which she began to tell me what had happened to her since I had seen her last.

It was a rather painful story.  After two or three years in a girls’ college in her own country she had set out with her mother for a long tour of the European capitals.  In Berlin, at what was falsely called a Charity Ball, she had met a young Russian Count who was understood to be rich and related to one of the Grand Ducal families.  Against the protests of her father (a shrewd American banker), she had married the Count, and they had returned to New York, where her mother had social ambitions.