Once Kildare asked (she missed the wistfulness of his voice), "Ain't it time you were riding again, Kit, and playing cards with the boys? They like to have you 'round. They're getting jealous of that kid of yours."
Kate smiled at him, absently. She was sitting on the floor, building a house of blocks under instruction from young Jemima. The amusements of men seemed to her futile things, just then, and childish.
"Benoix has given us the go-by, too. Won't touch a card or drink a drop nowadays. I don't know what's come over him. Good gad—" Kildare gave himself an impatient shake,—"sometimes I think the little Frenchman's a female in disguise!"
Kate smiled again. She knew very well what had come over Jacques. That much at least she had done in return for the precious thing his friendship was.
At last her eyes were opened. One day she saw her husband striding toward the house from the stables, pale, frowning, splashed with blood.
She cried out, and ran to him, "Basil! What's happened? Are you hurt?"
"Nonsense! I've just had to kill Juno, that's all."
"Kill Juno?" she gasped. "Good Heavens! Was she mad? Did she attack you?" She gathered up her child with an instinctive, fierce gesture of protection.
He grinned at her. "What an imagination! Bitches don't go mad, my dear. She littered yesterday, and her pups were all curs, that's all—every damned one of them. Beastly luck! So I've killed the lot of them—Juno, too."
She recoiled from him, repeating stupidly, "You killed them? Killed your own dog because her puppies were mongrels? Basil! I—I—don't think I understand."