The prolonged horror of the honeymoon had come
to an end at last. Geraldine had tasted the bitter
degradation of having been given, for the mere relief
of his symptoms, to a man whom she did not love;
and Lord Fastnet, his brief season of song and gay
plumage over, returned to Castle Fastnet> where he
relapsed into the quagmire of bucolic Catholicism
and the drifting sloth engendered by the soft, misty
climate. Soon he neglected to shave, and became an
object of physical repulsion to his wifa She bore



WHEN THE TIDE TURNS 57

him no child, to her secret joy, but an express griev-
ance of his; and having, after six years of hell, ar-
rived at a state of neutrality and found a modus
vivendi, she began to live, and he began to die. The
process was slow, beginning at the extremities, with
gout in the feet and incipient softening of the brain,
and was destined to last thirty years before the cen-
tres of life gave out.
Geraldine had come on a visit to her friend at
Ballyculter, and was, of course, included in the invi-
tation for the Hamiltons' picnic. She thought Ru-
pert much the most attractive of the young people
about her, and had readily fallen in with his sugges-
tion that they should stroll off after lunch to where
they could get a view of the sound ; and thus it hap-
pened that she was sitting beside him, under the
ruined wall, looking down on the landlocked waters
of the sound. The Miss Gregsons had led off most
of the other young people, to indulge in violent
games; the elders were sitting about on the sward,
gossiping; Rupert and Lady Fastnet had the ruin
to themselves.
