a way of escape. Her sister Yvonne had met Jack Bendish at a
race-meeting and he had fallen madly in love with her and married
her in a month in the teeth of opposition. That was luck--heaven-sent
luck, for Yvonne on the night before her marriage had broken down
utterly and confessed that if Jack had not saved her she would have
gone off with the first man who asked her on any terms, because she
was twenty-nine and sick to death of wandering with her father on the
outskirts of society. Subsequently Yvonne had after a hard fight won
a footing at Wharton for herself and her sister, and there Laura had
met Clowes, not such a social prize as Jack, but rich and able to
give his wife an assured position. She was shrewd and realized that
in himself he had little to offer beyond a handsome and highly
trained physique and a mind that worked lucidly within the limits of
a narrow imagination but she was beyond all words grateful to him,
and he fascinated her more than she realized.

The ten days at Eastbourne opened her eyes. Bernard enjoyed
every minute of them and was exceedingly pleased with himself
and proud of his wife, but for Laura they were a time of heavy
strain. Innocent and shy, she had feared her husband, only to
discover that she loved him better than he was capable of loving
her. Laura was not blind. She understood Bernard and all his
limitations, the dangerous grip that his passions had of him,
his boyish impatience, his wild-bull courage, and his inability
to distinguish between a wife and a mistress: she was happiest
when he slept, always holding her in his arms, exacting even in
sleep, but so naively youthful in the bloom of his four and
twenty summers, and, for the moment, all her own. She loved him
"because I am I--because you are you," and her tenderness was
edged with the profound pity that women felt in those days for