She hurried out of the room, from which she was absent only a very few moments. The Marquis, with a finger between the pages of the review which he had been reading, looked up as she re-entered. She was a woman of nameless gifts, of pleasant if not unduly slim figure. Her forehead was perhaps a little low, her eyes brilliant and intelligent, her mouth large and exceedingly mobile. She was not above the allurements of dress, for her house gown, with its long tunic trimmed with light fur, was of fashionable cut and becoming. Her fingers, cleansed now from the violet stains, were shapely, almost elegant. She threw herself into an easy chair opposite her visitor, and reached out her hand for a cigarette. "Well," she asked, "and how has the great trial ended?" "Adversely," the Marquis confessed. "You foolish person," she sighed, lighting the cigarette and throwing the match away. "Of course you were bound to lose, and I suppose it's cost you no end of money." "I believe," he admitted, a little stiffly, "that my lawyers are somewhat depressed at the amount." She smoked in silence for a moment. "So he will go back to Mandeleys. It is a queer little fragment of life. What on earth does he want to do it for?" "Obstinacy," the Marquis declared,--"sheer, brutal, ignorant obstinacy." "And the boy?" she asked, pursuing her own train of thought. "Have you heard anything of him?" "Nothing. To tell you the truth, I have made no enquiries. Beyond the fact that it seems as though, for the present, Richard Vont will have his way, I take no interest in either of them." She nodded thoughtfully. "If only we others," she sighed, "could infuse into our lives something of the marvellous persistence of these people whom in other respects we have left so far behind!" "My dear Marcia," he protested, "surely, with your remarkable intelligence, you can see that such persistence is merely a form of narrow-mindedness. Your father has shut in his life and driven it along one narrow groove. To you every day brings its fresh sensation, its fresh object. Hence--coupled, of course, with your natural gifts--your success. The person who thinks of but one thing in life must be indeed a dull dog." "Very excellent reasoning," she admitted. "Still, to come back to this little tragedy--for it is a tragedy, isn't it?--have you any idea what he means to do when he gets to Mandeleys?" "None at all!" "Let me see," she went on, "it is nineteen years ago last September, isn't it?--nineteen years out of the middle of his life. Will he sit in the garden and brood, I wonder, or has he brought back with him some scheme of mediaeval revenge?"