A woman accustomed to many emotions can almost always hold herself in check, if she be of strong will. Experience has taught her the meaning and the danger of those swift rushes of the blood that lead to unreasoning outburst. She is forewarned, forearmed, and can resist or not as occasion demands. But even she is sometimes taken unawares. How much the more likely to give way is the woman who has never felt passionate emotion in her life before. The premonitory symptoms fail to convey the sense of danger to her inexperienced mind. Before the will has time to act she is swept on by a new force, bewildering, irresistible. It becomes an ecstatic madness of joy or grief, and to the otherwise rational being her actions are of no account. This curse of quick responsiveness afflicts men to a less degree. If the first chapters of Genesis could be brought up to date, woman would be endowed, not with an extra rib, but with an extra nerve. Now that she knew the shooting of Jimmie to be an affair of no great seriousness, her heart sickened at the thought of her wild exhibition of feeling. She heard the sniggering and ridicule in every carriage-load of homeward-bound guests. From the wife of the scrubby curate to the Princess of Herren-Rothbeck, her name was rolled like a delicate morsel on the tongue of every woman in the county. And the inference they could not fail to draw from her action was true--miserably true. But she had only become poignantly aware of things at the moment when she saw the lean haggard man in rusty black covering Jimmie with the revolver. Then all the unrest of soul which she had striven to allay with her mockery, all the disquieting visions of sweet places to which she had scornfully blinded her eyes, all the burning words of passion whose clear echoing had wrapped her body in hateful fever the night before, converged like electric currents into one steady light radiant with significance. Two minutes afterwards, when Jimmie fell, civilisation slipped from her like a loose garment, and primitive woman threw herself by his side. But now, reclothed, she shivered at the memory. The door opened suddenly, and Mrs. Hardacre entered. There was battle in every line of the hard face and in every movement of the thin, stiff figure. Norma rose from the window where she had been sitting and faced her mother defiantly. “I know what you are going to say to me. Don't you think you might wait a little? It will keep.” “It won't. Sit down,” said Mrs. Hardacre between her teeth. “I prefer to stand for the moment,” said Norma. Mrs. Hardacre lost her self-control.