Within an hour Mrs. Durlacher descended to the dining-room. The gown she wore would not have pleased a man to infatuation; but a woman would have realized its beauty, known its value. With deft fingers, she arranged the flowers. In a chair by the fire, hiding herself from view to any one outside the window, she sat and watched the table being laid, giving orders how the vases were to be placed on the old oak table. "Lay two places--that's all," she said. Taylor looked up. "I thought you said there would be a lady with Mr. Traill, madam." "I said--probably. You can lay another place if she comes." A vision crossed her mind of making so small a point as that, a moment of embarrassment for her unwelcome guest. Then a sound reached her ears. Her eyes were arrested, fixed unseeingly to a point before her as she listened. "Is that a motor, Taylor?" Taylor looked out of the window. "It's a taxi-cab, madam." "Can you see who's inside?" "I suppose it's Mr. Traill, madam. Yes--it is." "Any one with him?" "Yes, madam--a lady." CHAPTER II Circumstances will almost make a character in a day; in three years, a character can be moulded, bent, twisted or straightened, in the furnace of events; just as the potter, idling with the passive clay, will shape it, heedlessly almost, as the fancy nerves his fingers. But before he is aware, the time slips by, the clay gets set and there, in front of his eyes, is the figure as his fancy made it--brittle, easily broken into dust, but impossible of being moulded afresh until it shall again go back into the water of oblivion and become the shapeless mass that once it was. So, in the three years that had passed since she had yielded body and soul into the keeping of Jack Traill, had Sally's character become set in the moulding of his influence. Happiness she had--that to the full. He cared for her the more when once he had her gentle nature under his touch; showed her all those little attentions of which such a mind as his is capable of conceiving--teased her, petted her, laughed like a schoolboy at her feminine whims and fancies. For the first month of their relationship, they went abroad. He gave her money, more money than she had ever had in absolute possession before, wherewith to fit herself for the journey. She tried to refuse half of it--told him the sum was preposterous, that less than half of what he was giving would provide her with the most expensive of frocks for the rest of her life. "Sixty pounds?" he said. "My sister spends that in half an hour at a dressmaker's in Dover Street." "Ah, yes, but that's your sister," she had objected pathetically. "And you?" "But thirty pounds will really be more than enough." It lay deep in her mind, never offering to rise to the surface, to remind him that she was not his wife. But he would not give way. He had said sixty pounds--sixty pounds it had to be. So he mastered her, without effort, at every turn.