Leah went about for the next seven days with her head in the air, and with a contempt for those people who found renunciation difficult. She could renounce, with ease: had she not refused a large sum of money because she felt that it was wrong to take it? What self-denial! She felt aggressively virtuous, and but for the circumstances would have liked to trumpet her perfections in the street. That she did not do so was further self-denial and a flattering conscience, with which Providence had nothing to do, assured her that she was a pearl amongst women. Now that Demetrius was out of sight she calmly put him out of mind, and began to think how she could prevent Askew from spoiling Jim's nefarious courting of the Spanish lady. There was no way, so far as she could see, since the sailor's love had grown cold, and she had no bonds in which to bind him. But she trusted to that luck which the fetish always sent her way, and sure enough the luck came, but some weeks later. Beforehand the fetish, still annoyed by her prayer to another god, sent her a reminder that it could be disagreeable. A bolt from the blue came in the shape of a telegram from Firmingham. "Come to me at once," wired the Marchioness. "Yacht lost off Brest. Duke and Frith and most of crew drowned. Come." "She might have spared the last word," said Leah, staring and stunned. CHAPTER XXVI Lady Jim boarded a special train to Firmingham in a royal rage, the more riotous for necessary suppression. After the shock of the unexpected had passed, she gave a flitting thought of pity to her drowned relatives, and reverted hastily to selfish considerations. Solitude permitting the play of temper, she punished the fetish, by flinging its outward and visible sign of a peacock's feather from the compartment which witnessed the unmasking. That her Baal should have played her such a trick was intolerable, and still more intolerable the thought that circumstances muzzled her. For the first time in her victorious life Leah Kaimes dealt with a fixed decree, against which there was no appeal. What could she do? Nothing! To make chaos of a continent would not have relieved her feelings, and there was nothing to wreck in the limited space of the carriage. Unable to sit still, she threw herself from seat to seat, feeling like a caged tiger, with the added savagery of a trained intellect. Unlike the beast, she had the use of speech to vent her wrath, but this she did not utilise from a conviction that no words would do justice to the situation. A Texan mule-driver's vocabulary would have fallen short of her requirements. Her impotent anger was like that of a dog leaping and slavering against an offending but unreachable moon.