love me--you do--you will always!--whatever people may say?"

He was surprised at the note almost of violence in her voice. He answered
it by a passionate caress, which she bore with trembling. Then she
resolutely moved away.

"Do go!" she said to him, imploringly. "I'd like to be a few
minutes--alone--before they come back."

He saw her settle herself by the fire, her hands stretched out to the
blaze. Seeing that the fire was low, and remembering the chill of her
hands in his, he looked around for the wood-basket which was generally
kept in a corner behind the piano.

His movement was suddenly arrested. He was looking towards the
uncurtained window. The night had grown pitch dark outside, and there
were splashes of rain against the glass. But he distinctly saw as he
turned a man's face pressed against the glass--a strained, sallow, face,
framed in straggling black hair, a face with regular features, and eyes
deeply set in blackened orbits. It was a face of hatred; the lips tightly
drawn over the teeth, seemed to have a curse on them.

The vision lasted only a moment. Ellesborough's trained instinct, the
wary instinct of the man who had parsed days and nights with nature in
her wilder and lonelier places, checked the exclamation on his lips. And
before he could move again, the face had disappeared. The old holly bush
growing against the farm wall, from which the apparition seemed to have
sprung, was still there, some of its glossy leaves visible in the bright
light of the paraffin lamp which stood on the table near the window. And
there was nothing else.

Ellesborough quietly walked to the window, drew down the blind, and
pulled the curtains together. Rachel looked around at the sound.

"Didn't I do that?" she said, half dreamily.

"We forgot!" He smiled at her. "Now it's all cosy. Ah, there they are!
Perhaps I'll get Janet to come as far as the road with me." For voices
were approaching--Janet talking to the girls. Rachel looked up,
assenting. The colour had rushed back to her face. Ellesborough took in
the picture of her, sitting unconscious by the fire, while his own
pulse was thumping under the excitement of what he had seen.

With a last word to her, he closed the sitting-room door behind him, and
went out to meet Janet Leighton in the dark.

IX

It was a foggy October evening, and Berkeley Square, from which the
daylight had not yet departed, made a peculiarly dismal impression on
the passers