impersonal; it was not his but any admiration that she craved as a
parched land wants rain.

Less than three months a wife, more than five years a widow, still
young and ardent, nearing the noontide of her womanhood, and immolated
in this house of perennial mourning, making vain oblation of her youth,
her beauty, the rich wine of life that coursed so lustily through her
being, upon the altar of a memory whose high priestess was only an old,
old woman....

He perceived that it would be quite possible for him, did he yield to
the bent of his sympathies, to dislike Madame de Sévénié most
intensely.

Not that he was apt to have much opportunity to encourage such a
gratuitous aversion: to-morrow would see him on the road again, his
back forever turned to the Château de Montalais....

Or, if not to-morrow, then as soon as the storm abated.

It was raging now as if it would never weaken and had the will to raze
the château though it were the task of a thousand years. From time to
time the shock of some great blast of air would seem to rock upon its
foundations even that ancient pile, those heavy walls of hewn stone
builded in times of honest workmanship by forgotten Sieurs de Montalais
who had meant their home to outlast the ages.

Rain in sheets sluiced the windows without rest. Round turrets and
gables the wind raved and moaned like a famished wild thing denied its
kill. Occasionally a venturesome gust with the spirit of a minor demon