He noted her blue dress, he guessed the reason she had put it on; and he made an inward comment of scorn.  It was the same blue, and it was near the same style of the dress she wore the last time he saw her.  She watched to see whether it made any impression on him, and was piqued to observe that he who had in that far past always swept her with an admiring, discriminating, and deferential glance, now only gave her deference of a courteous but perfunctory kind.  It made the note to all she said and did that evening—­the daring, the brilliance, the light allusion to past scenes and happenings, the skilful comment on the present, the joyous dominance of a position made supreme by beauty and by gold; behind which were anger and bitterness, and wild and desperate revolt.

For, if love was dead in him, and respect, and all that makes man’s association with woman worth while, humiliation and the sting of punishment and penalty were alive in her, flaying her spirit, rousing that mad streak which was in her grandfather, who had had many a combat, the outcome of wild elements of passion in him.  She was not happy; she had never been happy since she married Rudyard Byng; yet she had said to herself so often that she might have been at peace, in a sense, had it not been for the letter which Ian Stafford had written her, when she turned from him to the man she married.

The passionate resolve to compel him to reproach himself in soul for his merciless, if subtle, indictment of her to bring him to the old place where he had knelt in spirit so long ago—­ah, it was so long!—­came to her.  Self-indulgent and pitifully mean as she had been, still this man had influenced her more than any other in the world—­in that region where the best of herself lay, the place to which her eyes had turned always when she wanted a consoling hour.  He belonged to her realm of the imagination, of thought, of insight, of intellectual passions and the desires of the soul.  Far above any physical attraction Ian had ever possessed for her was the deep conviction that he gave her mind what no one else gave it, that he was the being who knew the song her spirit sang....  He should not go forever from her and with so cynical a completeness.  He should return; he should not triumph in his self-righteousness, be a living reproach to her always by his careless indifference to everything that had ever been between them.  If he treated her so because of what she had done to him, with what savagery might not she be treated, if all that had happened in the last three years were open as a book before him!

Her husband—­she had not thought of that.  So much had happened in the past three years; there had been so much adulation and worship and daring assault upon her heart—­or emotions—­from quarters of unusual distinction, that the finest sense of her was blunted, and true proportions were lost.  Rudyard ought never to have made that five months’ visit to South Africa a year before, leaving her alone to make the fight against the forces round her.  Those five months had brought a change in her, had made her indignant at times against Rudyard.