The last I heard of Gloria Carlyle was that she had settled in Italy and was living in a villa near Florence. And I saw a vision of Gloria in a very white villa among the myrtle and magnolia and waxen camellias of that country, and walking in lanes where green lizards moved swiftly up grey stone walls--dear Gloria of the tiger-tawny hair and the funny crooked smile like a naughty fairy’s. She was a very sweet and thoughtful woman, and her voice never, never intruded, it was like a hidden stream, quite delicious.... Aubrey Carlyle told me that I could tell or write this story as I wished, saying that it might better the knowledge of men about their womenfolk; “for there are too many men,” he said, “who do not know their jobs as regards their women. And I have learnt mine too late.” My friend Aubrey is a man of an aloof and almost haughty demeanour, which may have perhaps induced that rather abrupt manner that has repelled many people from him; for though a certain aloofness was thought very proper to the looks of an English gentleman of a past time, it is now held to be quite out of place among the corrupt genialities of the democratic state. A tall, dark-looking man he was, and elegant in a tweedy sort of way. Rich always, he had never been a wastrel, and London bored him to distraction--or “to distinction,” as an American out of Texas once said. A Tory landlord of Liberal sympathies, he was always a model administrator of his properties; and chief among these we, their friends, counted Gloria, for she seemed--how can one suggest these shades of understanding?--more particularly and peculiarly his wife than are the wives of less fortunate men. It is said of the Carlyles that they have always been bad to their women and that there has been no charge on the female estate for more than two hundred years; but Aubrey and Gloria were a charming couple. It was always quite evident that she loved him--tall Gloria of the tiger-tawny hair and the funny crooked smile like a naughty fairy’s; while it was equally evident--to those few, of course, who could look beneath the aloof surface of the man--that he treasured her enormously. And then, one day, she left him; and she never came back. Now Aubrey despised what he called the “trumpery parlour-tricks” of the countryside. He was not civilised enough, he said. The elegant pastime of killing a pretty fowl of the air without any risk to yourself, or of chasing a scared fox across a county--though that was better, for you at least risked a broken collar-bone--did not amuse him very much. He was a hunter after wild beasts. And because you may not kill wild beasts in England, for they walk on two legs and stern laws protect them, the other four continents knew Aubrey Carlyle for many months in the year. And because Gloria was not a hunter after wild beasts she stayed in England, and was much with us in London, and we sometimes with her at Malmanor. But she was an amazingly still woman.