Then Dane Barrington had figured as co-respondent in a divorce case that rocked the city of Sydney and spread ripples of luscious scandal to the dinner-tables of New Zealand. Nothing but the bare announcement of the affair appeared in the press, and when he afterwards married the woman concerned the talk died down. Articles and verse from his pen appeared at intervals, and Valerie read everything he wrote with a strange feeling that he was writing for her. Then she heard at a dinner in her home one night that he had left Sydney and had come to live in New Zealand, at Christchurch. And there was a whisper that he and his wife did not get on. Because of his magnetic looks rumour could not let him alone. He was one of those men who accumulate publicity without any personal effort. Then again came the bare announcement in the press that his wife had divorced him and had returned to Australia. The name of the lady concerned this time was suppressed.
The colonies will stand one divorce, and if the details are not too unpleasant, will suspend judgment and give the parties a chance. But two divorces inside of four years strain their charity. And when not long afterwards Dane Barrington was blackballed out of the best club in Christchurch every door, save those of a few newspaper men, was closed to him. Nothing as to this final blow appeared in the press, so that lovers of scandal drew all the more upon the inexhaustible resources of their imagination. Dane Barrington himself would have been amazed to discover that the mere mention of his name conjured up in the breasts of the pure pictures of depravity that it would have taxed his own powers to depict.
Valerie had learned next that Dane had come up to Auckland and that her father had met him. For some time after that his name did not appear in print. But
