The whole matter was to Mrs. Kaye the more amazing and iniquitous because she had hitherto always defended Mrs. Maule when that lady's conduct was discussed, as it constantly was discussed, in the neighbourhood of Rede Place. At Redyford Vicarage such talk had never been tolerated; and with a few stinging words of rebuke Mrs. Kaye had ever put the gossips in their places. It had suited her far better to have to deal with a brilliant, beautiful, rather reckless woman, who was much away from home, and who always treated her with the courtesy and indifferent good-humour due to an equal, rather than with the type of great lady to whom she knew some of the other clergy's wives were in subjection. CHAPTER II "L'opinion dispose de tout. Elle fait la beauté, la justice, et le bonheur qui est le tout du monde." To say that the most important events of life often turn on trifling incidents has become a truism, and yet it may be doubted if any of us realise how especially true this is concerning the greatest of human riddles, the riddle of sex. Had the man of whose presence on the platform of Selford Junction Mrs. Maule had become aware, turned round and watched the London express before it steamed out of the station, his own immediate future, to say nothing of that secret, inner life of memory which each human being carries as a burden, might have been considerably modified. But at the moment when Mrs. Maule had been engaged in trying her not very happy experiment with Bayworth Kaye, the only other occupant of the platform was staring with a good deal of interest and curiosity at a long row of illustrated newspaper pages pinned dado-wise round the top of the bookstall. The newsagent's clerk, when arranging his wares that morning, had had what he felt to be an unusually bright idea. Picking out what he considered the two most attractive items in the illustrated paper with which he was dealing, he had repeated these items alternately with what to most onlookers would have seemed an irritating regularity. The two pages he had selected for this honour were very different. The one consisted of a set of photographs, nine officers in uniform: _General Hew Lingard and his Staff, just returned home after the victorious Amadawa Expedition_. "Here," the bookstall clerk had probably argued unconsciously, and quite wrongly, to himself, "is a page that will interest gentlemen and boys. Now I must find something that will cause ladies to purchase the paper," and he had accordingly put next to the page of military portraits one consisting of a single illustration--the reproduction of a beautiful painting of a beautiful woman.