Sunday at Home, and Draycott, back from the East, had appeared as interesting as a white Othello.

For a time she received all she needed out of life, and she threw herself into her husband's promotion-hunger; understanding it, because she, too, wanted to reign, and it gave her an inexplicable feeling of respect for him, for Clarice knew that had she been born a man, she, too, would have worked and schemed and pushed herself out into the front of the ranks. She combined with him as only an ambitious woman can combine, and she supplied all he lacked. It filled her mind, and she never awoke the jealousy that lay like a sleeping python in the heart of Draycott Wilder. It was when they were in India that Clarice, for the first time, lost her grip and allowed her senses to get the better of her common sense, and she became for a brief time a woman with a very troublesome heart. Hector Copplestone, a young man newly come to the Indian Civil Service, was sent to their Punjaub station. He made Mrs. Wilder realize her own charm, he made her terribly conscious that she was older than him, he made her anxious and distracted and madly, idiotically in love with him. She forgot that there were other things in life, she put aside ambition for a stronger temptation, and she did not care what Draycott thought or supposed.

No one ever knew what happened, but everyone guessed that Wilder had made trouble. They left India under the same cloud of silence, and they reappeared in Mangadone to outside eyes the same couple who had pulled together for successful years of marriage; and if some whisper, for whispers carry far in the East, came after them, no one regarded it, and the Copplestone incident was considered permanently closed. Draycott Wilder was the same silent man who was the despair of his dinner partners, and Clarice had her old brilliancy and her old way of making men pleased with themselves; and though some people, chiefly young girls, described her as "hard," she represented a centre of attraction, and her one mad year was a thing of the past.

Among the men who went to the terraced house in its huge gardens, she always particularly welcomed Hartley, the Head of the Police. He never demanded effort, and he had a good nature and a flow of small talk. Nearly every woman liked Hartley, though very few of them could have said why. He had fair, fluffy hair and a pink face; he was just weak enough to be easily influenced, and he fell platonically in love with every new woman he met without being in the least faithless to the others. Mrs. Wilder had a corner in her heart for him, and he, in return, looked upon Mrs. Wilder as a brilliant and lovely 

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