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a chamber plainly yet comfortably enough furnished sat a woman, grey-tressed and haggard with passion and care more than with the lapse of years. She was one of the many self-torturers of earth—the cold, grey, implacable and melancholy believers in a demon god. This was Beatrice, the woman who had divorced her husband, Philip Mortlake, and now lived without a name, a hope, a joy.

She had been beautiful once, and still bore traces of that former beauty about her—dark, swarthy and fateful, with pronounced features and sombre brown, heavily-lidded eyes. Those daughters of Eve who are blue-eyed may be fickle, capricious, and not over earnest in what they do or say, but they seldom plunge their men into such hells of misery as those fiercely jealous, implacable and unapproachable tawny martyrs do, who follow up an idea like a Red Indian on the trail, and seldom weep, but never forgive. These are the women whose loves are slight, but their hatreds fierce; who raise up a fancied wrong into an imperishable pyramid