chanced upon her one day, dancing in her nursery, and was so carried
away by the charm of the performance that for the moment he forgot that
she was transgressing one of his most rigid rules.

In the child's gracious, alluring gestures he was reminded of the first
time that he had seen her mother dance, and of how it had thrilled him.
Beneath the veneer with which his self-enforced austerity had overlaid
his emotions, he felt his pulses leap, and was bitterly chagrined at
being thus attracted.

He found himself brought up forcibly once more against the inevitable
consequences of his marriage with Diane, and reasoned that through his
weakness in making such a woman his wife, he had let loose on the
world a feminine thing dowered with the seductiveness of a Delilah and
backed--here came in the exaggerated family pride ingrained in
him--by all the added weight and influence of her social position as a
Vallincourt.

"Never let me see you dance again, Magda," he told her. "It is
forbidden. If you disobey you will be severely punished."

Magda regarded him curiously out of a pair of long dark eyes the colour
of black smoke. With that precociously sophisticated instinct of hers
she realised that the man had been emotionally stirred, and divined in
her funny child's mind that it was her dancing which had so stirred him.
It gave her a curious sense of power.

"Sieur Hugh is _afraid_ because he likes me to dance," she told her
mother, with an impish little grin of enjoyment.