He was just at the age when such affairs are sternest realities to modern men. He was beyond the uncertainty of youth, and before the compromises and practicalities of middle life. And there was something about Gladys Dehon to make a man who cared for her ride rough-shod, neck or nothing, over all things else. All the world admired her; would have loved her had it dared. There was no daring about it in Austin’s case; his audacity was not self-conscious; he simply followed her as he had followed her over combe and beacon on that Exmoor day. People could tell him little about her, save that she had been very poor and very proud, and was very beautiful. Gladys Darcy--that had been her name--last of a broken family of Devon and of Ireland. She had neither sister nor brother, only a broken-down father, long since sold out of his Household captaincy. She had sold herself to Terwilliger Dehon, the rich speculator; and she was his, as a cut diamond might have been his; bought with his money, shining in his house, and he no more within her secret self than he might have been within the diamond’s brilliant surface. And two months after the wedding her old father had died and made the sacrifice in vain. Then she became the personage that the world knew as the “beautiful Mrs. Dehon.” May used to dream and ponder about her, long hours of nights and days; and he fancied that something about her life, her lonely bringing-up, her father’s precepts, had made her scornfully incredulous of there being such a thing as the novelist’s love in life. She had been a greater nature than her father, and all mankind had been nothing to her as compared with even him. Too early scorn of this world’s life prepares the soul for evil compromises. Her character, her nature, she expressed in no way whatever. She had neither intimate friends, charitable occupations, tastes, follies, nor faults. She shone with a certain scornful glitter of splendor, but even of old Dehon’s millions she was not prodigal. She never flirted; she never looked at one man long enough for that. Her one occupation was hunting, and she rode to hounds in a way to jar the nerves of every M. F. H. in England.