5 Left alone, the K.C.'s first feeling was relief. During the last weeks he had grown more and more resentful of his father's interference. And now he had finished with his father for good. Nevertheless, the taunt about his war-service rankled. Rankled, too, the admiral's last sentence, "Get rid of her." "God, if only I could get her back," thought Hector; and so thinking, remembered, as born orators will remember past speeches, his opening in the Ellerson case, his impassioned defense of woman's right to free citizenship. Then he remembered Renée. Renée had returned to England. How the devil had his father found out about Renée? Aliette, of course! Aliette must have told his father about Renée. Hector's gorge rose. He took a cigar from the box on his desk, lit it, and began to stride slowly up and down the book-lined room. Alternatively he visioned Renée, greedy, compliant, satisfying to nausea, and Aliette--Aliette the ultra-fastidious, infinitely unsatisfying. His marriage to a woman of Aliette's temperament had been a mistake. A mistake! Best cut one's loss--best get rid of her. Best comply with his father's wishes. And yet--how desirable, how infernally and eternally desirable was Aliette. The mood passed, leaving only rage in its wake. Curse Aliette! Curse his father! Curse the Cavendishes! How they would laugh if he yielded. They were all persecuting him, trying to break him. And "They sha'n't break me," he muttered; his teeth biting on the cigar till they met through the sodden leaf. "They sha'n't break me." Hector returned to his desk, and tried to absorb himself once more in study. But his mind refused its office. It seemed to him as though there were a ghost in the room, the ghost of his wife. "I wonder if she ever thinks of me. I wonder if she ever sees me--as I see her," he thought. "As I am seeing her now." 6 That afternoon, however, there was no picture of her legal owner in Aliette's mind. For months he had been receding further and further into the background of her thoughts, till now he had become more a menace than a man. It surprised her, as she walked slowly up Piccadilly after her meeting with Hector's father, to realize how little Hector had ever mattered, how much--always--Ronnie. Ronnie would be glad perhaps, to hear of her meeting with the admiral. "Dear old Billy!" she thought, "dear old Billy!" And thinking about him, a rare tinge of selfishness streaked her altruism. Suppose Billy succeeded! Suppose Hector really did set her free! How wonderful to be "respectable" again--to be done with the make-believe "Mrs. Cavendish" of Powolney Mansions, to be really and truly and legally Ronnie's! Always Ronnie had been splendid, loyalest of lovers; and yet--and yet--even in the shelter of a lover's arms one was conscious of outlawry, of the world's ostracism. What if, soon perhaps, the lover's arms were to be a husband's?