She sprang up from the couch, where she had been lolling indolently amid a heap of cushions, and crossed the room to his side. “Do you hear me?” she cried violently, shaking him by the arm. “You think I’m a blind fool! But I’m not! I’m not! I’ve seen that Peterson woman looking at you like a cat looking through the larder window----” Suddenly she felt Blaise’s hand clapped against her lips, stemming the torrent of vulgar recrimination and abuse that poured from them. He held it there quite gently, so as not to hurt her, but immovably, and she had perforce to hear what he wished to say in rebellious silence. “Listen to me,” he said gently. “It is quite true what you say--that I love Jean Peterson and that she loves me. But we have given up our love, and with it our hope of happiness in this world, for you. In return, you will give up something for us. You will give up the infinite pleasure you appear to derive from vilifying and belittling a woman who is as much above you as the heavens are above the earth, whose conception of love is as fine and pure as yours is mean and commonplace and jealous. You will never again speak to Miss Peterson with anything but respect, nor will you ever again refer to the love which you now know for a fact exists between us. Your lips soil such love as ours. If you do, if you disobey my commands in either of these respects, you go out of my house that same day. _And you don’t return._” He released her and had the satisfaction, for once, of perceiving that she believed he meant what he said. Presumably she came to the conclusion that, in the circumstances, discretion was the better part of valour, for she made no attempt to challenge his determination in the matter. At the same time, unknown to him, she compelled Jean to pay for the silence enforced upon her at home. With a species of venom, absurdly childish in its manifestation, she essayed to excite Jean’s envy by constantly enlarging to her upon the subject of Blaise’s perfections as a husband, drawing entirely imaginary descriptions of the attention he paid her and of his constant solicitude for her welfare, and vaunting her happiness at being his wife. “I am so proud to have won so fine and splendid a husband,” she would declare fervently. “Would you not feel the same, Miss Peterson, if you were me?” And Jean would make answer, outwardly unmoved: “Indeed I should. You ought to be a happy woman, Mrs. Tormarin.” The quiet composure which Jean invariably opposed to these knat-like attacks annoyed Nesta intensely. Endowed with all the petty jealousy of a small nature, she herself, had the situation been reversed, would have found this pinprick kind of warfare insupportable, and it made her furious that her best thought-out and most spiteful efforts failed to goad Jean into any expression of either anger or distress. The “cold Englishwoman’s” armour of indifference and reserve seemed impervious to no matter what poison-tipped dart she loosed against her.