For "Beauty" the Viscount had no love; indeed, well-nigh a hatred, for a reason never guessed by others, and never betrayed by him.
Bertie was not like the Royallieu race; he resembled his mother's family.

She, a beautiful and fragile creature whom her second son had loved, for the first years of his life, as he would have thought it now impossible that he could love anyone, had married the Viscount with no affection toward him, while he had adored her with a fierce and jealous passion that her indifference only inflamed.

Throughout her married life, however, she had striven to render loyalty and tenderness toward a lord into whose arms she had been thrown, trembling and reluctant; of his wife's fidelity he could not entertain a doubt; though, that he had never won her heart, he could not choose but know.

He knew more, too; for she had told it him with a noble candor before he wedded her; knew that the man she did love was a penniless cousin, a cavalry officer, who had made a famous name among the wild mountain tribes of Northern India.
This cousin, Alan Bertie--a fearless and chivalrous soldier, fitter for the days of knighthood than for these--had seen Lady Royallieu at Nice, some three years after her marriage; accident had thrown them across each other's path; the old love, stronger, perhaps, now than it had ever been, had made him linger in her presence--had made her shrink from sending him to exile.

Evil tongues at last had united their names together; Alan Bertie had left the woman he idolized lest slander should touch her through him, and fallen two years later under the dark dank forests on the desolate moor-side of the hills of Hindostan, where long before he had rendered "Bertie's Horse" the most famous of all the wild Irregulars of the East.
After her death, Lord Royallieu found Alan's miniature among her papers, and recalled those winter months by the Mediterranean till he cherished, with the fierce, eager, self-torture of a jealous nature, doubts and suspicions that, during her life, one glance from her eyes would have disarmed and abashed.