Evidently Madame Danterre had had a kind of almost uncanny power of terrifying the soldier.  He had been a good man when she first met him, and he had been a good man after that short time of mad infatuation.  He was by nature and training almost passionately respectable; he was at length happily married; but this horror of an evil incident in the past had got such a hold on his nerves that when he met Madame Danterre (whom he had believed to be dead) coming out of a theatre in London, the hero of the Victoria Cross, of three other campaigns, perhaps the bravest man in England, fainted when he saw her.  Without doubt it was the publication of Mr. John Steele’s will leaving his enormous fortune to Sir David Bright that had resuscitated Madame Danterre.

From the moment of that shock David Bright had probably never been entirely sane on the subject.  The resurrection of Madame Danterre had seemed to him preternatural and fateful.  The woman had become to him something more or something less than human, something impervious to attack that could not be dealt with in any ordinary way.

From that time there had grown up an invisible barrier between him and his wife.  He found himself making silly excuses for being out at quite natural times.  He found himself getting afraid of her, and building up defences, growing reserved and absurdly dignified, trying to cling to the pedestal of the elderly soldier as he could not be a companion.

Madame Danterre had gone back to Florence, fat with blackmail, and then had begun a steady course of persecution.

Step by step he had sunk lower down, knowing that he was weakening his own case most miserably if it should ever become public.  Nothing satisfied her, although she received two thousand a year regularly, until the will was drawn up, which left everything to her except an allowance of L800 a year to Rose.

Once a year for three years Madame Danterre had visited London, and had generally contrived that Sir David should be conscious of the look in her astonishing eyes, which Sir Edmund had likened to extinct volcanoes, at some theatre, or in the park, once at least every season.  Evidently that look had never failed.  It touched the exposed nerve in his mind—­exposed ever since the time of illness and strain when he was young and helpless in India.  It was evident that he had felt that any agony was bearable to shield Rose from the suffering of a public scandal.  If he could only have brought himself to consult one of the Murrays something might have been done.  As it was, he had recourse to subterfuge.  He assured Madame Danterre annually, in answer to her insisting on the point, that no other will had ever been signed by him, but he always carried a will with him ready to be signed.  There was much of self-pity perhaps in the letter, there was the plaint of a wrecked life, but there was still more of real delicate feeling for Rose, of intense anxiety to shield her, of poignant