Up to the time of her meeting with Geoffrey, the young widow had gathered but one experience in her intercourse with the world—­the experience of a chartered tyrant.  In the brief six months of her married life with the man whose grand-daughter she might have been—­and ought to have been—­she had only to lift her finger to be obeyed.  The doting old husband was the willing slave of the petulant young wife’s slightest caprice.  At a later period, when society offered its triple welcome to her birth, her beauty, and her wealth—­go where she might, she found herself the object of the same prostrate admiration among the suitors who vied with each other in the rivalry for her hand.  For the first time in her life she encountered a man with a will of his own when she met Geoffrey Delamayn at Swanhaven Lodge.

Geoffrey’s occupation of the moment especially favored the conflict between the woman’s assertion of her influence and the man’s assertion of his will.

During the days that had intervened between his return to his brother’s house and the arrival of the trainer, Geoffrey had submitted himself to all needful preliminaries of the physical discipline which was to prepare him for the race.  He knew, by previous experience, what exercise he ought to take, what hours he ought to keep, what temptations at the table he was bound to resist.  Over and over again Mrs. Glenarm tried to lure him into committing infractions of his own discipline—­and over and over again the influence with men which had never failed her before failed her now.  Nothing she could say, nothing she could do, would move this man.  Perry arrived; and Geoffrey’s defiance of every attempted exercise of the charming feminine tyranny, to which every one else had bowed, grew more outrageous and more immovable than ever.  Mrs. Glenarm became as jealous of Perry as if Perry had been a woman.  She flew into passions; she burst into tears; she flirted with other men; she threatened to leave the house.  All quite useless!  Geoffrey never once missed an appointment with Perry; never once touched any thing to eat or drink that she could offer him, if Perry had forbidden it.  No other human pursuit is so hostile to the influence of the sex as the pursuit of athletic sports.  No men are so entirely beyond the reach of women as the men whose lives are passed in the cultivation of their own physical strength.  Geoffrey resisted Mrs. Glenarm without the slightest effort.  He casually extorted her admiration, and undesignedly forced her respect.  She clung to him, as a hero; she recoiled from him, as a brute; she struggled with him, submitted to him, despised him, adored him, in a breath.  And the clew to it all, confused and contradictory as it seemed, lay in one simple fact—­Mrs. Glenarm had found her master.

“Take me to the lake, Geoffrey!” she said, with a little pleading pressure of the blush-colored hand.

Geoffrey looked at his watch.  “Perry expects me in twenty minutes,” he said.