“Thank God for it!” he replied lightly. “It’s the cussed contradictoriness of your sex that makes it so enchanting. If women were logical they would be as obvious and boring as the average man.” He relapsed into a dreaming silence. Jean broke it rather hesitatingly. “You’ve never suggested taking me to England before.” His face darkened suddenly. It was an extraordinarily expressive face--expressive as a child’s, reflecting every shade of his constant changes of mood. “There’s no sense of adventure about England,” he said shortly. “It’s a dull corner of the world--bristling with the proprieties.” Jean realised how very completely, from his own point of view, he had answered her. Romance, beauty, the sheer delight of utter freedom from the conventions were as the breath of his nostrils to Glyn Peterson. Born to the purple, as it were, of an old English county family, he had stifled in the conventional atmosphere of his upbringing. There had been moments of wild rebellion, bitter outbursts against the established order of things, but these had been sedulously checked and discouraged by his father, a man of iron will, who took himself and his position intensely seriously. Ultimately, Glyn had come to accept with more or less philosophy the fact of his heirship to old estates and old traditions, with their inevitable responsibilities and claims, and he was just preparing to fulfill his parents’ wishes by marrying, suitably and conventionally, when Jacqueline Mavory, the beautiful half-French opera singer, had flashed into his horizon. In a moment the world was transformed. Artist soul called to artist soul; the romantic vein in the man, so long checked and thwarted, suddenly asserted itself irresistibly, and the very day before that appointed for his wedding, he and Jacqueline ran away together in search of happiness. And they had found it. The “County” had been shocked; Glyn’s father, unbending descendant of the old Scottish Covenanters, his whole creed outraged, had broken under the blow; but the runaway lovers had found what they sought. At Beirnfels, a beautiful old schloss on the eastern border of Austria, remote from the world and surrounded by forest-clad hills, Glyn Peterson and Jacqueline had lived a romantically happy existence, roaming the world whenever the wander-fever seized them, but always returning to Schloss Beirnfels, where Peterson had contrived a background of almost exotic richness for the adored woman who had flung her career to the winds in order to become his wife. The birth of Jean, two years after their marriage, had been frankly regarded by both of them as an inconvenience. It interrupted their idyll. They were so essentially lovers that no third--not even a third born of love’s consummation--could be other than superfluous.