r you are all
gone," she said; and she turned at Durrance's side and walked down with
him into the garden.

"We shall come back, no doubt," said Durrance, reassuringly.

Mrs. Adair looked about her garden. The flowers were gone, and the
sunlight; clouds stretched across the sky overhead, the green of the
grass underfoot was dull, the stream ran grey in the gap between the
trees, and the leaves from the branches were blown russet and yellow
about the lawns.

"How long shall you stay at Wiesbaden?" she asked.

"I can hardly tell. But as long as it's advisable," he answered.

"That tells me nothing at all. I suppose it was meant not to tell me
anything."

Durrance did not answer her, and she resented his silence. She knew
nothing whatever of his plans; she was unaware whether he meant to break
his engagement with Ethne or to hold her to it, and curiosity consumed
her. It might be a very long time before she saw him again, and all that
long time she must remain tortured with doubts.

"You distrust me?" she said defiantly, and with a note of anger in her
voice.

Durrance answered her quite gently:--

"Have I no reason to distrust you? Why did you tell me of Captain
Willoughby's coming? Why did you interfere?"

"I thought you ought to know."

"But Ethne wished the secret kept. I am glad to know, very glad. But,
after all, you told me, and you were Ethne's friend."

"Yours, too, I hope," Mrs. Adair answered, and she exclaimed: "How could
I go on keeping silence? Don't you understand?"

"No."

Durrance might have understood, but he had never given much thought to
Mrs. Adair, and she knew it. The knowledge rankled within her, and his
simple "no" stung her beyond bearing.

"I spoke brutally, didn't I?" she said. "I told you the truth as
brutally as I could. Doesn't that help you to understand?"

Again Durrance said "No," and the monosyllable exasperated her out of
all prudence, and all at once she found herself speaking incoherently
the things which she had thought. And once she had begun, she could not
stop. She stood, as it were, outside of herself, and saw that her speech
was madness; yet she went on with it.

"I told you the truth brutally on purpose. I was so stung because you
would not see what was so visible had you only the mind to see. I wanted
to hurt you. I am a bad, bad woman, I suppose. There were you and she in
the room talking together in the darkness; there was I alone upon the
terrace. It w