together--possessed a memory like a dry-plate. He did not foresee that a
passing conversation in an Indian bungalow might perchance photograph
itself on the somewhat sparsely covered tablets of a man's mind, to be
reproduced at the wrong moment with a result lying twenty-six years ahead
in the womb of time.




CHAPTER II

SUBURBAN

_L'amour fait tout excuser, mais il faut etre bien sur qu'il y a de i
amour._


Miss Anna Hethbridge loved Seymour Michael with as great a love as her
nature could compass.

When the news of his death reached her, at the profusely laden
breakfast-table at Jaggery House, Clapham Common, her first feeling was
one of scornful anger towards a Providence which could be so careless.
Life had always been prosperous for her, in a bourgeois, solidly wealthy
way, entirely suited to her turn of mind. She had always had servants at
her beck and call, whom she could abuse illogically and treat with an
utter inconsequence inherent in her nature. She had been the spoilt child
of a ponderous, thick-skinned father and a very suburban mother, who, out
of her unexpected prosperity, could deny her daughter nothing.