ream--a heavenly,
unbelievable dream. Betty could imagine how she would look wrapped up
and sitting in her steamer chair, gazing out with rapturous eyes upon
the racing waves.

"She will be happy," she thought. "But I shall not. No, I shall not."

She drew in the morning air and unconsciously turned towards the place
where, across the rising and falling lands and behind the trees, she
knew the great white house stood far away, with watchers' lights showing
dimly behind the line of ballroom windows.

"I do not know how such a thing could be! I do not know how such a thing
could be!" she said. "It COULD not." And she lifted a high head, not
even asking herself what remote sense in her being so obstinately defied
and threw down the glove to Fate.

Sounds gain a curious distinctness and meaning in the hour of the break
of the dawn; in such an hour they seem even more significant than sounds
heard in the dead of night. When she had gone to the window she had
fancied that she heard something in the corridor outside her door, but
when she had listened there had been only silence. Now there was sound
again--that of a softly moved slippered foot. She went to the room's
centre and waited. Yes, certainly something had stirred in the passage.
She went to the door itself. The dragging step had hesitated--stopped.
Could it be Rosalie who had come to her for something. For one second
her impulse was to open the door herself; the next, she had changed her
mind with a sense of shock. Someone had actually touched the handle and
very delicately turned it. It was not pleasant to stand looking at it
and see it turn. She heard a low, evidently unintentionally uttered
exclamation, and she turned away, and with no attempt at softening
the sound of her footsteps walked across the room, hot with passionate
disgust. As well as if she had flung the door open, she knew who
stood outside. It was Nigel Anstruthers, haggard and unseemly, with
burned-out, sleepless eyes and bitten lip.

Bad and mad as she had at last seen the situation to be, it was uglier
and more desperate than she could well know.

CHAPTER XLV

THE PASSING BELL

The following morning Sir Nigel did not appear at the breakfast table.
He breakfasted in his own room, and it became known throughout the
household that he had suddenly decided to go away, and his man was
packing for the journey. What the journey or the reason for its being
taken happened to be were things not