She had herself lost absolutely all power over the man who had been so blindly her slave. Their positions had wholly changed. It was she who shrank from his glance; it was he who ordered and was obeyed. She, who had no acquaintance with pain, suffered as never before would she have believed it possible to suffer. Humiliation, terror, abhorrence, self-contempt, were all united to an agony of apprehension with regard to the future. She would easily have made a second marriage, but her tyrant forbade her any such issue from her difficulties. She had never before supposed that it would ever be possible for her to be miserable in London, but she was so now; the dull cold bleak weather aiding her depression, and the mourning which she had still to wear seeming to her indeed the very livery of gloom. A whole hothouse of flowers emptied into her room could not make opaque yellow fog supportable, and the sight of William Massarene driving past her windows or coming up the staircase anything less than torture. How she envied those women of ruder ages who could hire bravoes for a quick cold steel to rid them of what they loathed. She hated him so intensely that there were even times when she looked wistfully in at the gunsmiths’ shops in Piccadilly. But she lived in a world in which all strong passions seemed farcical, and the ridicule of the thing restrained her from buying a revolver. A tragedy with Billy as the slain! She laughed a hollow little laugh of misery and scorn as she threw herself back in her brougham and ceased to look at the little ivory mounted weapons so temptingly displayed by the gunsmiths. She had insight enough to perceive that his adoration of her was a thing dead and gone for ever; she saw that the only dregs of it which remained with him were love of hurting her, of mortifying her, of ordering her about as though she were a factory wench in one of his cotton-mills in North Dakota. Fortunately for her his prudence saved her from any display of this tyranny in public; but in private he treated her as a tanner of the Ile de France might have treated a young duchess of the Faubourg when it only needed a sign to the mob for the axe to fall and the pikes to be twisted in the perfumed hair. She had no will of her own; she dared not dispose of her time for a week; she had to know what he permitted and what he forbade. “She’s a morsel for a king,” he would say to himself, passing his tongue over his lips. Still he had become very indifferent to her, except that his power of humiliating her was always agreeable and stimulating to him. “You’ve found out as Billy ain’t a fool, haven’t you, my beauty,” he said a hundred times to her. “Billy’s been one too many for you, eh?” And at such moments if a revolver had been near her she would have shot him dead.