When he first met her, Alicia was already married to Guy Vernon, weak, worthless and rich. Sir Percy remembered, with a flush of self-abasement, how ready, nay, how eager, he had been to listen to the plausible stories Alicia told him of Guy Vernon’s ill-treatment and neglect of her. But she had omitted to mention that she had squandered half of Guy Vernon’s fortune within the first three years of their married life, and had compromised herself with at least half-a-dozen men since her marriage. True, also, that Alicia and Sir Percy were at a lonely post among the hills on the Afghan frontier, and that he and Guy Vernon’s wife had been thrown together in an intimacy impossible anywhere else on the face of the globe. True, again, was it that Alicia Vernon’s flattery had been insidious beyond words. Money was what she had heretofore required more than anything else on earth except the enslavement of men. Sir Percy’s fortune, however, was only a modest patrimony, which would scarcely have sufficed for six months for what Alicia Vernon considered her actual needs. As she had in reality seduced Sir Percy’s honour, so, in a way, was she herself seduced by his powerful intelligence, by his brilliance and by his success, which, with a woman’s prescience, she felt sure was only the presage of greater things. She inherited from her father a clear and trenchant mind, and she readily foresaw that the time would come when this young Indian civil servant would be heard of by all his world. She, however, was his first courtier. It was impossible that a woman so gifted, so complex, so courageous as Alicia Vernon should not have at least one virtue in excess. That was her love for her father. False she was to him in many ways, but true she ever was in love of him. By the exercise of all her intelligence, and by eternal vigilance, she had succeeded in making General Talbott believe her the purest, the most injured woman alive. He always called her "my poor Alicia," and hated her husband with a mortal hatred, thinking him to have injured the gentlest and sweetest of women. Sir Percy’s infatuation for Alicia Vernon lasted but a few months, and, through Alicia’s woman’s wit, was unsuspected by the world, least of all by General Talbott, who adored his daughter. Then Sir Percy awoke once more to honour, and pitied the woman and hated himself for the brief downfall.