But no hard words followed the discussion of Risca's rose-coloured and woefully ironical description of his work. Herold knew what pains of hell had got round about the man he loved, and strove to mitigate them with gaiety and affection. And while the Great High Belovedest and the Great High Favourite were grappling together with a tragedy not referred to in speech between them, and as remote from Stella's purview of life as the Lupanaria of Hong-Kong, she, with her white hand on the head of the blue Great Dane, who regarded her with patient, topaz eyes, looked out from her western window, over the channel, on the gold and crimson lake and royal purple of the sunset, and built out of the masses of gloried cloud and streaks of lapis lazuli and daffodil gem a castle of dreams compared with which poor John Risca's trumpery palace, with its Arachnes and Liliases and Niphetoses, was only a vulgar hotel in a new and perky town. CHAPTER II THE judge pronounced sentence: three years' penal servitude. The condemned woman, ashen-cheeked, thin-lipped, gave never a glance to right or left, and disappeared from the dock like a ghost. John Risca, the woman's husband, who had been sitting at the solicitor's table, rose, watched her disappear, and then, the object of all curious eyes, with black brow and square jaw strode out of the court. Walter Herold, following him, joined him in the corridor, and took his arm in a protective way and guided him down the great staircase into the indifferent street. Then he hailed a cab. “'May I come with you?” Risca nodded assent. It was a comfort to feel by his side something human in this pandemonium of a world.