More than once he had been very near, or so he had thought at the time, to the finding of his secret ideal,--of that woman who should be at once lover and friend. But some element, generally that of the selfless tenderness for which his heart craved, was lacking in the unlawful loves to which he considered himself compelled to confine his quest. He based his ideal on the tie which had bound his uncle, Lord Bosworth, to Madame Sampiero, and of which he had become aware at a moment when his youth had made him peculiarly susceptible to what was fine and moving in their strange, ardent romance. To his ideal,--so he could still tell himself when on one of those lamentable return journeys from some experimental excursion in that most debatable land, le pays du tendre,--he could and would remain faithful, however faithless he might become to the actual woman who, at the moment, had fallen short of that same ideal. Berwick constantly made the mistake of consciously seeking love, and so of allowing nothing for that element of fantasy and surprise which has always played so great a part in spontaneous affairs of the heart. He asked too much, not so much of love, as of life--intellect, passion, tenderness, fidelity, all these to be merged together in one who could only hope to be linked with her beloved in unlawful, and therefore, so whispered experience, in but temporary bonds. During the last ten years--Berwick was now thirty-five, and, while his brief married life lasted, he had been absolutely faithful to the poor sickly woman whose love for him had fallen short of the noblest of all--he had found some of the qualities he regarded as essential to a great and steadfast passion, first in one, and then in another, but never had he found them all united, as his uncle had done, in one woman. Mrs. Marshall, of whom his sister was still so afraid had first attracted him as a successful example of that type of woman to whom beauty, and the brilliant exercise of her feminine instincts, stand in lieu of mind and heart, and whose whole life is absorbed in the effort to excite feelings which she is determined neither to share nor to gratify. To vivify this lovely statue, to revenge, may-be, the wrongs of many of his sex, had been for Berwick an amusing diversion, a game of skill in which both combatants were to play with buttoned foils. But Mrs. Marshall, caught up at last into the flames in which she had seen so many burn--holocausts to her vanity and intense egotism--suddenly began to love Berwick with that dry, speechless form of passion which sears both the lover and the beloved, and which seems to strip the woman of self-respect, the man of that tenderness which should drape even spurious passion.