ay." She rose with a
vague sense that the end had come, and put out a groping hand toward
the door.

Arment stood motionless. She turned to him with a faint smile.

"You forgive me?"

"There is nothing to forgive--"

"Then will you shake hands for good-by?" She felt his hand in hers: it
was nerveless, reluctant.

"Good-by," she repeated. "I understand now."

She opened the door and passed out into the hall. As she did so, Arment
took an impulsive step forward; but just then the footman, who was
evidently alive to his obligations, advanced from the background to let
her out. She heard Arment fall back. The footman threw open the door,
and she found herself outside in the darkness.

THE LETTER

I

For many years he had lived withdrawn from the world in which he had
once played so active and even turbulent a part. The study of Tuscan
art was his only pursuit, and it was to help him in the classification
of his notes and documents that I was first called to his villa.
Colonel Alingdon had then the look of a very old man, though his age
can hardly have exceeded seventy. He was small and bent, with a finely
wrinkled face which still wore the tan of youthful exposure. But for
this dusky redness it would have been hard to reconstruct from the
shrunken recluse, with his low fastidious voice and carefully tended
hands, an image of that young knight of adventure whose sword had been
at the service of every uprising which stirred the uneasy soil of Italy
in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Though I was more of a proficient in Colonel Alingdon's later than his
earlier pursuits, the thought of his soldiering days was always coming
between me and the pacific work of his old age. As we sat collating
papers and comparing photographs, I had the feeling that this dry and
quiet old man had seen even stranger things than people said: that he
knew more of the inner history of Europe than half the diplomatists of
his day.

I was not alone in this conviction; and the friend who had engaged me
for Colonel Alingdon had appended to his instructions the injunction to
"get him to talk." But this was what no one could do. Colonel Alingdon
was ready to discuss by the hour the date of a Giottesque triptych, or
the attribution of a disputed master; but on the history of his early
life he was habitually silent.

It was perhaps because I recognized this silence and respected it that
it afterward came to be broken for me