“It was a miserable business altogether. The girl, Nesta Freyne was an Italian. Blaise met her when he was travelling in Italy, and--oh, well, it wasn’t love! Not love as I know it, and as I think, one day, you too will know it. It blazed up, just one of those wild infatuations that sometimes spring into being between a man and a woman, and almost before he had time to think, Blaise had married her----” “_Married her!_” The words leapt from Jean’s lips before she could check them. In the account of Tormarin’s disastrous love affair which had been forced upon her hearing in London, there had been no mention of the word marriage, and she had always imagined that the woman, this Nesta Freyne, had simply jilted him in favour of another man. Moreover, since she had been at Staple, nothing had been said to correct this impression, as, very naturally, the subject was one avoided by general consent. And now, without warning or preparation, she found herself face to face with the fact that Blaise had been married--that he had belonged to another woman! It seemed to set her suddenly very far apart from him, and a fierce, intolerable jealousy of that other woman leaped to life in her heart, racking her with an anguish that was almost physical. She was confused, bewildered, by the storm of emotion which suddenly swept her whole being. “Married her?” she repeated with dry lips. “Yes. Didn’t you know that Blaise was a widower?” Had Lady Anne divined the stress under which the girl was labouring that she so quickly interposed the knowledge that his wife was dead? “No,” answered Jean unsteadily. “I didn’t even know that he had been married.” The fact of that other woman’s being dead did not serve to allay the tumult within her. She had lived, and while she lived she had been _his wife!_ “Yes, he married her.” Lady Anne went on speaking in level tones. “I think matters were hurried to a climax by the fact that Nesta’s step-sister, Margherita Valdi, detested English people. She was much the elder of the two, and as their mother had died when Nesta was born, she had practically brought the girl up. She would never have countenanced the idea of her marrying an Englishman, but Nesta so contrived her meetings with Blaise that Margherita was unaware of his very existence, and eventually they married without her knowledge. From that day onward, Margherita declined to hold any communication with her sister.” “Why had she such a rooted antipathy to the English?” Jean had recovered her composure during the course of Lady Anne’s narrative, and now put her question with a very good semblance of detachment. But, inside, her brain was dully hammering out the words “Married--married!”