r might
unclose or a portiere lift.

"Go where, pray, at this time of night, or morning?"

"Oh, to The Dials. Ring for a motor; they will take you in again; or
go to the rector's."

The last of the fire had flared up. The flame went out.

Sinking back in her chair, she waited in a tranced stillness, her eyes
on the ashes of the fire. She had said her say out, perhaps the man
knew it, and as she leaned back in the cushions he saw how completely
it all lay with him at the end. She thought he came back and waited a
second at her side; she thought he bent a moment over her, but she did
not stir until the cold wind from an opening door, till the clicking of
a latch made her start, and then she turned to see that he had gone.

Bulstrode came back to the castle Christmas Day at nine o'clock. But
the hour had the effect of being much earlier. The winter morning
panoplied with festivity began its life slowly, and not all the day's
brightness through which he had speeded his motor had yet come into the
house. Bulstrode, drawn by it, went directly back to the room he had
left several hours before, as though he expected still to find the
woman he loved sitting before the extinguished fire.

Two parlor maids were whisking their skirts and dusters out of the
opposite door, a footman at their heels. Touches of the inevitable
order which reduces an agreeable disarray to the impersonal had already
been put to the scene of Jimmy's tenderness, and the curtains drawn
well away from the long windows let in the morning that entered broadly
and fell across the hearth and the fresh-lit fire.

Clean logs replaced the cold ashes: the match had just finished with
the kindlings, and Bulstrode went over to welcome the crackling of the
young blaze. The absence of his host, the castle once more handed over
to him for the time, gave him a feeling of proprietorship in the bright
cordial room, but looking up at the portraits of Westboro's in puffs
and velvets, Jimmy couldn't find an ancestor! Their amours and
indulgences had written brilliant and amusing history; the gentlemen
had gone mad at ladies' carriage wheels, they had carried off their
scandals with the highest of hands, and still held their heads well.
They had carved and raped and loved their way down to the present time,
and were none the less a proud line of pure British blood. The
American bachelor, about whose fine head nothing picturesque or worthy
of history circled,