“Nothing of that, dear, can ever come our way. It does n't come the way of decent folk. People like us don't have anything to do with that side of life.” Stella still sobbed. The words brought no conviction. Lady Blount continued her unenlightened consolation. Let the precious ostrich stick her head in a bush, and that which she could not see could by no chance happen. “But men are out there--” she waved her arm vaguely--“who kill women and little children.” “But we never meet the men,” cried poor Lady Blount, insistently. “Our lives are free from all that.” She preached her narrow gospel. There was a class of beings in the world who did all kinds of ferocious, criminal, cruel, mean, and vulgar things; but they were a class apart. In the world in which she herself and Stella and John and Walter dwelt all was beauty and refinement. Stella dried her eyes. At one-and-twenty one cannot weep forever. She allowed herself to be half persuaded of the truth of her Aunt Julia's sophistries. But the little, impish devil who stage-manages the comedies of life arranged a day or two afterward a sardonic situation. It was the mildest of December mornings. Old Autumn humped a brave and kindly shoulder against Winter's onrush. A faint south-west wind crept warmly over the Channel, and sweet odours came from the moist, unsmitten earth. A pale sun clothed the nakedness of the elms and chestnuts in the garden, and brightened to early spring beauty the laurels and firs. Stella, with Constable near by, sat in the sunshine, by the ivy-clad north-eastern front of the old Channel House, and her chair was beneath the window of the morning-room. Now that she could sit upright, she had learned to use her hands in many ways. She could knit. She was knitting now, vaguely and tremulously hoping that the result might be a winter waistcoat for her Great High Belovedest, intent on her counting, one, two, three, four, pearl one, when suddenly voices in altercation broke upon her ear. It was merely an unhappy, ignoble quarrel such as for many years had marred that house of sweet-seeming. Fierce hatred and uncharitableness were unchained and sped their clamorous and disastrous way. Bitter words uttered in strident and unnatural tones wounded the quiet air. The woman lost her dignity in vain recrimination. The man snarled savage and common oaths. Suddenly the door slammed violently, and there was the silence of death. The scene had lasted only a few moments. Sir Oliver, in his foolish anger, had evidently followed his wife into the morning room and left her abruptly. But the few moments were enough for Stella, who had heard everything. Her heart seemed frost-bitten, and her blood turned to ice. The cruel, vulgar, and hideous things of life were not the appanages of a class apart. They entered into her own narrowed world. Her beautiful world! Her hateful, horrible terror of a world! CHAPTER XIV IN midwinter the shadow that hung over John gathered into storm-cloud.