face coloured, and she walked away to the fireplace, and
cautiously tended it. Constraint had seized him again, and his heart
was loud.

"Edwin," she summoned him, from the fireplace.

He rose, shaking with emotion, and crossed the undiscovered spaces of
the room to where she was. He had the illusion that they were by
themselves not in the room but in the universe. She was leaning with
one hand on the mantelpiece.

"I must tell you something," she said, "that nobody at all knows except
George's father, and probably nobody ever will know. His sister knew,
but she's dead."

"Yes!" he muttered, in an exquisite rush of happiness. After all, it
was not with Charlie, nor even with Janet, that she was most intimate;
it was with himself!

"George's father was put in prison for bigamy. George is illegitimate."
She spoke with her characteristic extreme clearness of enunciation, in
a voice that showed no emotion.

"You don't mean it!" He gasped foolishly.

She nodded. "I'm not a married woman. I once thought I was, but I
wasn't. That's all."

"But--"

"But what?"

"You--you said six or seven years, didn't you? Surely they don't give
that long for bigamy?"

"Oh!" she replied mildly. "That was for something else. When he came
out of prison the first time they arrested him again instantly--so I was
told. It was in Scotland."

"I see."

There was a rattle as of hailstones on the window. They both started.

"That must be Charlie!" she exclaimed, suddenly loosing her excitement
under this pretext. "He doesn't want to ring and wake the house."

Edwin ran out of the room, sliding and slipping down the deserted stairs
that waited patiently through the night for human feet.

"Forgot to take a key," said Charlie, appearing, breathless, just as the
door opened. "I meant to take the big key, and then I forgot." He had
a little round box in his hand. He mounted the stairs two and three at
a time.

Edwin slowly closed the door. He could not bring himself to follow
Charlie and, after a moment's vacillation, he went back into the
breakfast-room.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOUR.

Amazing, incalculable woman, wrapped within fold after fold of mystery!
He understood better now, but even now there were things that he did not
understand; and the greatest enigma of all remained unsolved, the
original enigma of her treachery to himself... And she had chosen