Beauchamp asked if the lady was alone, and not waiting for the answer,
though he listened while writing, and heard that she was heavily veiled,
he tore a strip from his notebook, and carefully traced half-a-dozen
telegraphic words to Mrs. Culling at Steynham. His rarely failing
promptness, which was like an inspiration, to conceive and execute
measures for averting peril, set him on the thought of possibly
counteracting his cousin Cecil's malignant tongue by means of a message
to Rosamund, summoning her by telegraph to come to town by the next
train that night. He despatched the old woman keeping the house, as
trustier than the young one, to the nearest office, and went up to
the drawing-room, with a quick thumping heart that was nevertheless as
little apprehensive of an especial trial and danger as if he had done
nothing at all to obviate it. Indeed he forgot that he had done anything
when he turned the handle of the drawing-room door.

CHAPTER XL. A TRIAL OF HIM

A low-burning lamp and fire cast a narrow ring on the shadows of the
dusky London room. One of the window-blinds was drawn up. Beauchamp
discerned a shape at that window, and the fear seized him that it might
be Madame d'Auffray with evil news of Renee: but it was Renee's name he
called. She rose from her chair, saying, 'I!'

She was trembling.

Beauchamp asked her whisperingly if she had come alone.

'Alone; without even a maid,' she murmured.

He pulled down the blind of the window exposing them to the square, and
led her into the light to see her face.

The dimness of light annoyed him, and the miserable reception of her;
this English weather, and the gloomy house! And how long had she been
waiting for him? and what was the mystery? Renee in England seemed
magical; yet it was nothing stranger than an old dream realized. He
wound up the lamp, holding her still with one hand. She was woefully
pale; scarcely able to bear the increase of light.

'It is I who come to you': she was half audible.

'This time!' said he. 'You have been suffering?'

'No.'

Her tone was brief; not reassuring.

'You came straight to me?'

'Without a deviation that I know of.'

'From Tourdestelle?'

'You have not forgotten Tourdestelle, Nevil?'

The memory of it quickened his rapture in reading her features. It was
his first love, his enchantress, who was here: and how? Conjectures shot
through him like lightnings in the dark.

Irrationally, at a moment when