Looking at the radiant being people did not always remember, and some people did not know, the tragedy of her youth. She had been a good woman once, quite good, a model wife. She had married, before her eighteenth birthday, a husband she adored. A creature of intense vitality, made of fire and light, sense and not mind, love with her had been a flame; unwise, unreasoning, exacting; love without thought; wildly adoring, wildly jealous. A word, a look given to another woman set her raging; and it was after one of the fierce quarrels that her jealous temper made only too frequent that her husband--handsome, gay, in the flower of his youth--left her without the goodbye kiss, for his last ride. He was brought back to her in the winter twilight, without a word of warning, killed at the last ditch in a point-to-point race, a race that was always remembered as the finest of many seasons; perhaps all the more vividly remembered because of that tragedy just before the finish, when Jim Bellenden broke his neck. For some time after that dreadful night Kate Bellenden was under restraint; and then, after nearly a year, in which none but near relations had seen her or had even known where she was, she came back to the world; not quite sane, and desperately wicked. That small brain of hers had not been large enough to hold a great grief. Satan had taken possession of a mind that had never been rightly balanced. "I have done with love," she told her _âme damnée_. She had always her shadow and confidante, upon whom she lavished gifts and indulgences. "I can never love anybody after _him_: but I like to be loved, and I like to make it hard for my lovers." And then, in still wickeder moods, she would say, "I like to steal a woman's husband, or to cut in between an engaged girl and the man she is to marry. I like to make another woman as desolate as I was after Jim was killed, but I can't make her quite as miserable. I am not Death. But," with a little exulting laugh, "I am almost as bad." There were people--a mother, a sister, or a wife--here and there in the crowd we call Society, who thought Mrs. Bellenden worse than Death; people who knew the fortunes she had wasted, the houses she had ruined, the hearts she had broken, the careers she had blighted, and the souls that had been lost for her. CHAPTER XXV Finding Claude Rutherford the most agreeable person in a house full of people, Mrs. Bellenden took possession of him on the first evening--not with any obvious devices or allurements, but coolly and calmly, just as she possessed herself of the most becoming arm-chair in the drawing-room, with such an air of distinct appropriation that other women avoided it. "You seem to be the only amusing person here," she said, as he came to her side after dinner. "Isn't it strange that in so small a party there should be such a prodigious amount of dullness?"