Tragedy was moving upon the twain with ghastly step, her face muffled in her sable robe. They had created in their dreams a radiant Eden for their souls to wander in, yet the ancient dragon had squirmed in amid the leaves. Nothing is sacred in this world to the sordid sarcasms of the fool and the libertine. And the fatal chance that first parted the boughs and suffered the world to peer in upon their paradise was mean and prosaic enough in all truth. That identical afternoon Mrs. Marjoy had driven a friend over, who was staying with her, to visit Domremy. They had left their phaeton at a cottage in the valley and had walked through the woods to the castle. The causeway crossed the moat from the north, and Mrs. Marjoy and her companion, an Australian lady, reached the place unseen by Gabriel and Joan, who were on one of the southern turrets. Thus it befell that at the very moment Mrs. Marjoy and her guest were standing in the ruins of the chapel the man and the girl passed out from the black yawn of the southern gate and crossed the central court towards the northern entry. Mrs. Marjoy’s spectacled vision had doomed Gabriel to recognition. Herself unseen, that magnanimous lady watched the pair cross the court and disappear beneath the rotting portcullis of the northern gate. There was an intense and malicious satisfaction on Mrs. Marjoy’s red face. She displayed her teeth in a thin, cracked laugh, and gestured to her companion with her black umbrella. “Did you see those two?” she said. The Australian lady stared. “That worthy, my dear Mrs. Grace, is supposed to be our future member of Parliament. A horribly profligate creature.” “Indeed!” said the colonial lady, with some austerity. “I knew we should catch him before long,” continued the doctor’s wife, beaming with the thought of enjoying another woman’s shame. “His wife is staying away. Poor Mrs. Strong, if she could only see her husband gadding about with one of his women from London. I always knew he was a dissolute person. Did you ever see such a depraved, loose, dowdy-looking creature as that girl?” Mrs. Grace, a kindly woman, displayed some measure of surprise. Saltire society was fresh to her, and she was ignorant of the fact that Mrs. Marjoy considered herself a recording angel, by whose dictates man should stand or fall. Nor was Mrs. Grace in the habit of clutching at such violent conclusions, being herself a mother and a magnanimous woman of the world. “As a matter of fact,” she remarked, “I thought that girl looked particularly sweet and pretty.” Mrs. Marjoy glared and rattled the ribs of her umbrella. She always considered a difference of opinion as a personal affront. Only that morning she had declared to Dr. Marjoy that Mrs. Grace was a woman without strict convictions as to propriety, one of those flabby persons who never saw the glaring moral inconsistencies of others.