"

Her voice shook a little and he was suddenly afraid that she was going
to cry. He bent towards her.

"I think, perhaps, we are alike in that, Miss Craven. We do not make our
friends easily, but they mean a great deal to us when they come. Yes,
I _am_ lonely and I _am_ a little tired of bearing my worries alone, in
silence. Perhaps I can help you to stand this life a little better if I
tell you that--mine is every bit as hard."

She turned to him eyes that were filled with gratitude. Her whole
body seemed to be touched with some new glow. Into the heart of their
consciousness of the situation that had arisen between them there came,
sharply, the sound of a shutting door. Then steps in the hall.

"That's Rupert," she said.

They both rose as he came into the room. He stood back in the shadow for
a moment as though surprised at Olva's presence. Then he came forward
very gravely.

"I've found something of yours, Dune," he said. It lay, gleaming, in his
hand. "Your matchbox."

Dune drew a sharp breath. Then he took it and looked at it.

"Where did you find it?"

"In Saunet Wood. Bunker and I have been for a walk there. Bunker found
it."

As the three of them stood there, motionless, in the middle of the dark
room, Olva caught, through the open door, the last sad fading breath of
the "Valse Triste."

CHAPTER VII

TERROR

1

That night the cold fell, like a plague, upon the town. It came,
sweeping across the long low flats, crisping the dark canals with white
frosted ice, stiffening the thin reeds at the river's edge, taking each
blade of grass and holding it in its iron hand and then leaving it an
independent thing of cold and shining beauty. At last it blew in wild
gales down the narrow streets, throwing the colour of those grey walls
against a sky of the sharpest blue, making of each glittering star a
frozen eye, carrying in its arms a round red sun that it might fasten
it, like a frosted orange, against its hard blue canopy.

Already now, at half-past two of the afternoon, there were signs of the
early dusk. The blue was slowly being drained from the sky, and against
the low horizon a faint golden shadow soon to burn into the heart of the
cold blue, was hovering.

Olva Dune, turning into the King's Parade, was conscious of crowds of
people, of a gaiety and life that filled the air with sound. He checked
sternly with a furious exercise of self-control his impulse to creep
back into the narrow s