s in the room, for he
did not look toward him again or pay him any attention for a long while.
He only gazed out of the window into the fresh morning sunlight, and his
face worked and quivered and his lean hands chafed restlessly together
before him. But at last he seemed to realize where he was, for he turned
with a sudden start and stared at Ste. Marie, frowning as if the younger
man were some one he had never seen before. He said:

"Ah, yes, yes. You were wanting to go out into the garden. Yes, quite
so. I--I was thinking of something else. I seem to be absent-minded of
late. Don't let me keep you here."

He seemed a little embarrassed and ill at ease, and Ste. Marie said:

"Oh, thanks. There's no hurry. However, I'll go, I think. It's after
eleven. I understand that I'm on my honor not to climb over the wall or
burrow under it or batter it down. That's understood. I--"

He felt that he ought to say something in acknowledgment of O'Hara's
long speech about his daughter, but he could think of nothing to say,
and, besides, the Irishman seemed not to expect any comment upon his
strange outburst. So, in the end, Ste. Marie nodded and went out of the
room without further ceremony.

He had been astonished almost beyond words at that sudden and
unlooked-for breakdown of the other man's impregnable reserve, and dimly
he realized that it must have come out of some very extraordinary
nervous strain, but he himself had been in no state to give the
Irishman's words the attention and thought that he would have given them
at another time. His mind, his whole field of mental vision, had been
full of one great fact--_the girl was to be married to young Arthur
Benham_. The thing loomed gigantic before him, and in some strange way
terrifying. He could neither see nor think beyond it. O'Hara's burst of
confidence had reached his ears very faintly, as if from a great
distance--poignant but only half-comprehended words to be reflected upon
later in their own time.

He stumbled down the ill-lighted stair with fixed, wide, unseeing eyes,
and he said one sentence over and over aloud, as the Irishman standing
beside the window had said another.

"She is going to be married. She is going to be married."

It would seem that he must have forgotten his previous half-suspicion of
the fact. It would seem to have remained, as at the first hearing, a
great and appalling shock, thunderous out of a blue sky.

Below, in the open, his feet led