Poor little Betty of long ago--what a child she had been at nineteen!--but a child capable of deep and varied emotions.
At the time of their parting he had been absorbed in his own selfish sensations of anger, revolt, and the sharp sense of loss, savagely glad that she was unhappy too.

But after he had gone, after he had plunged into the new, to him exciting and curious, life of the great vessel taking him to Australia, he had forced himself to put Betty out of his mind, and, after a few days, he had started a violent flirtation with the most attractive woman on board the liner.

The flirtation had developed, by the time they reached Sydney, into a serious affair, and had been the determining cause why he had not written even to George.

Godfrey Radmore had not thought of that woman for years.

But to-night her now hateful, meretricious image rose, with horrid vividness, before him.