But Gundred, among many other antiquated notions in which she took pride, retained a most steadfast belief in the bodily existence of Satan. To be old-fashioned in manners, mind, morals--in everything but clothes--was her especial glory. In London she claimed to be conspicuous by her old-world excellencies. When she met, or heard--for they did not frequent her set--of other Dukes’ wives and daughters who were frivolous and freethinking and modern, Gundred took pride in asserting the obvious fact that she was not as they, that she continued to give a rare and beautiful example of pristine decorum to her order. Her friends might find the spectacle dull, but they could never deny that it was edifying. And among the old-fashioned adornments with which she persisted in decking her habit of mind, her belief in the Powers of evil, of witchcraft and possession, were given not the least important place. She described herself complacently as an old-fashioned Christian, and never passed a palmist’s placard in Bond Street without feeling that the law ought to have more scruples about allowing a witch to live. Now, accordingly, she primmed her lips fiercely at Kingston’s scepticism. ‘All I know is,’ she answered, ‘that these warnings are sent us for our good, and that the Powers of Evil are for ever round us, seeking whom they may devour. Kingston, will you, or will you not, pay attention to what I say?’ By this time her truculent attitude had dissipated her husband’s last lingering scruples. Looked at very minutely, very casuistically, perhaps it was not perfectly fair to force upon Gundred someone she disliked, simply because he himself desired to keep watch and communion with the precious personality that dwelt within the object of her hostility, and probably was the unknown cause of it. But nothing of all this could Gundred possibly know, for one thing; and, for another, her attitude had become so grotesquely exaggerated and defiant that no husband of any sense or spirit could be justified in giving way to it. Why, the situation was preposterous and transpontine to an intolerable degree. His own sudden fantastic instinct had been strange and grotesque enough, in all conscience; but Gundred’s fury of opposition lent yet a further touch of grotesqueness which removed the whole episode into the domain of mystical melodrama. Why, they might be living in a novel of Lytton or Mortimer Collins, instead of in a very comfortable and orderly present into which had suddenly flashed a gleam of romance out of an equally comfortable and orderly past. Kingston would not recognise his own instinct as anything abnormal, and was bent on keeping all suggestion of the abnormal out of his human relations. The prenatal memory, he knew, was not only a fact, but a fact--at any rate, in the East, where memory and its training are better understood than over here--of no uncommon occurrence. There was nothing strange