nearly unrecognizable.

"What is it?" she ejaculated, and turned to catch her reflection in a
mirror. She saw herself in a curious aspect also, white and a little
wild. One of her shoulder straps had slipped down across her arm.

"What a dress!" she said.

David carefully pronounced the words:

"That was Rysbroek, wasn't it?"

"Yes; I've known him since we were kiddies."

"I remember your saying so."

"He brought me bad news," she added, to imply, "That's it."

"Ah, I'm sorry."

There was no life in his voice.

In the dining room the servants moved noiselessly, as though fearful of
disturbing the long silences. A sickly breeze stirred the curtains of
apricot velvet. The brass band in Washington Square was playing
selections from Verdi; the long-drawn wails of the horns crept in
through the windows like snatches of a dirge. She was reduced to
speaking of the sultry air. A thunderstorm was brewing?

"The air will be clearer," he assented.

He ate nothing. When Hamoud had wheeled him back to the drawing-room,
he asked:

"Do you mind if I go? A splitting headache. This weather."

"You shouldn't have stayed in town, you see," she returned
automatically.

"Maybe I'll go up to Westchester for a week or so." His dull eyes
rested upon the picture that she made as she stood uneasily before him,
with an appearance of guilt, her figure like a shaft of flame springing
upward from the hearth, her brown head aureoled by the tempestuous
canvas of Bronzino. "Besides," he concluded, "keeping you here all
this while a prisoner----"

"How can you be so unkind?"

"At least I'm not ungrateful."

He made a sign to Hamoud, who stole forward to take his post behind the
wheel chair; and the two faces regarded her with the same brave, secret
look, the same queer impassiveness that was like a deafening cry. Her
nerves began to fail her. With an unaccountable feeling of perfidy she
straightened his cravat, while murmuring:

"I'll see you first, of course, dear?"

"Of course."

But he neither saw her nor telephoned before his departure; nor did he
write to her from the house in Westchester County. On the third day
she went to Brantome, who said:

"I was coming to see you."

Fixing her with his tragical old eyes, he informed her that he had
received a long-distance call from David Verne's physician, who had
telephoned from the house in Westchester County. In three days David
seemed to have lost all that