to the other.

Why did she care? Why did she care so much? Rosamund asked herself the
question almost with terror.

She found no answer.

But she could not pray. Whenever she tried to pray Mrs. Clarke came
before her, and a man--could it be Dion?--stamped with the hideous
imprint of physical lust.

* * * * *

Father Robertson was startled by the change in Rosamund's appearance
when she visited him two days after she had sent him the note. She
looked physically ill. Her color had gone. Her eyes were feverish and
sunken, and the skin beneath them was stained with that darkness which
betokens nights without sleep. Her lips and hands twitched with a
nervousness that was painful. But that which distressed him more than
any other thing was the expression in her face--the look of shame and of
self-consciousness which altered her almost horribly. Even in her most
frantic moments of grief for Robin there had always been something
of directness, of fearlessness, in her beauty. Now something furtive
literally disfigured her, and she seemed trying to cover it with a
dogged obstinacy which suggested a will stretched to the uttermost,
vibrating like a string in danger of snapping.

"Has Lady Ingleton gone?" she asked, directly she was inside the room.

"No, not yet. You remember I wrote to you that she would stay on for a
few days."

"But she might have gone unexpectedly."

"She is still here."

"I believe I shall have to see her," Rosamund said, with a sort of hard
abruptness and determination.

"Go to see her," said Father Robertson firmly. "Perhaps she was sent
here."

"Sent here?" said Rosamund, with a sharpness of sudden suspicion.

"Oh, my child,"--he put his hand on her arm, and made her sit
down,--"not by a human being."

Rosamund looked down and was silent.

"Before you go, if you are going," Father Robertson continued, sitting
down by the deal table on which he wrote his letters, "I must do what I
ought to have done long ago; I must speak to you about your husband."

Rosamund did not look up, but he saw her frown, and he saw a movement of
her lips; they trembled and then set together in a hard line.

"I know what he was, not from you but from others; from his mother,
from your sister, and from Canon Wilton. I'm going to tell you something
Wilton said to me about you and him after you had separated from him."

Father Robertson stopped, and fidgeted for a moment with the papers
lying in disorder on his