For once, not even the fear of Catherine's gibing tongue could hold her silent.
"I'm glad--glad--_glad_ you're going away!" she exclaimed passionately.
"When you are gone I will win back my husband." "Do you think so ?" was all she said.
But to Diane's keyed-up consciousness it was as though the four short words contained a threat--the germ of future disaster.
In due time Catherine quitted Coverdale for the austere seclusion of the sisterhood, and a very few weeks sufficed to convince Diane that her forebodings had been only too well founded.
Catherine had long been anxious to enter a community, restrained from doing so solely by Hugh's need of her as mistress of his house, and now that her wish was an accomplished fact, it seemed as though he were spurred on to increasing effort by the example of his sister's renunciation of the world.

He withdrew himself even more completely from his wife, sometimes avoiding her company for days at a time, and adopted a stringently ascetic mode of life, denying himself all pleasure, fasting frequently, and praying and meditating for hours at a stretch in the private chapel which was attached to Coverdale.

As far as it was possible, without actually entering a community, his existence resembled that of a monk, and Diane came to believe that he had voluntarily vowed himself to a certain form of penance and expiation for the marriage which the bigotry of his nature had led him to regard as a sin.
His life only impinged upon his wife's in so far as the upbringing of their child was concerned.

He was unnecessarily severe with her, and, since Diane opposed his strict ruling at every opportunity, Magda's early life was passed in an atmosphere of fierce contradictions.
The child inherited her mother's beauty to the full, and, as she developed, exhibited an extraordinary faculty for getting her own way.
Servants, playmates, and governesses all succumbed to the nameless charm she possessed, while her mother and old Virginie frankly worshipped her.
The love of dancing was instinctive with her, and this, unknown to Hugh, her mother cultivated assiduously, fostering in her everything that was imaginative and delicately fanciful.

Magda believed firmly in the existence of fairies and regarded flowers as each possessed of a separate entity with personal characteristics of its own.