“We must mend our ways, James. It may please you to know that I shall overlook your mental faithlessness to me. You may go on loving Matilde. She is dead. I am alive. I have the better of her there, _aïe?_ The day will come when she will be dead in every sense of the word. In the meantime, I am content to enjoy life. Frederic is quite safe with me, James; very much safer than he is with you. And now let us have peace. Will you ring for tea?” He sat down abruptly, staring at her with heavy eyes. She waited for a moment and then crossed over to pull the old-fashioned bell-cord. “We will ask Lydia and Frederic to join us, too,” she said. “It shall be a family party, the five of us.” “Five?” he muttered. “Yes,” she said, without a smile. CHAPTER X A fortnight passed. Yvonne held the destiny of three persons in her hand. They were like figures on a chess-board, and she moved them with the sureness, the unerring instinct of any skilled disciple of the philosopher's game. They were puppets; she ranged them about her stage in swift-changing pictures, and applauded her own effectiveness. There were no rehearsals. The play was going on all the time, whether tragedy, comedy, or chess. Brood's uneasiness increased. His moody eyes were seldom lifted to meet the question that he knew lurked in hers. She had given him a tremendous shock. There was seldom a moment in which he was not making strange inquiries of himself. Was it possible that she had spoken the truth about him? Could such a condition of mind exist without his knowledge? Was this love he professed to feel for her but the flame springing into life from those despised embers of long ago? Was it true that his inner self, his subconscious being, recognised no other claim to his love than the one held so insecurely by its original possessor? Was it true that his soul went back to her the instant slumber came to close up the gap of years? This strange, new wife of his had uttered amazing words; she had spoken without rancour; she had called his dreams to life; she had told him how he lived while asleep! He arose in the mornings, haggard from lack of reposeful sleep. In a way, he slept with one ear open, constantly striving to catch himself with the dream-name on his lips. He would awake with a start many times in the night, and always there seemed to be the vague, ghostlike whisper of a name dying away in the stillness that greeted his return to wakefulness. Now he confessed to himself that his dreams were of Matilde, as they had been during all the years. Heretofore they had been mere impressions upon his intelligence, and seldom remembered. They did not represent pictures or incidents in which she appeared as a potent factor, but brief monodies, with her name as the single note, her face a passing, yet impressive, vision. He had not realised how frequent, how real these dreams were until now.