re.--Honoria sighed over her friend. Helen had gone,
latterly, very much to the bad, she feared. And as all this passed
rapidly through her mind it aroused all her knight-errantry, raising a
strongly protective spirit in her. She questioned just how much active
care she might take of Lady Calmady without indiscretion of
over-forwardness.

But even while she thus debated, opportunity of action was lost.
Quietly, a great simplicity and singleness of purpose in her demeanour,
without word spoken, without looking back, Katherine followed the
house-steward across the cool, spacious hall, through a doorway and out
of sight.

And that singleness of purpose, so discernible in her outward
demeanour, possessed Katherine's being throughout. She was as one who
walks in sleep, pushed by blind impulse. She was not conscious of
herself, not conscious of joy or fear, or any emotion. She moved
forward dumbly, and without volition, towards the event. Her senses
were confused by this transition to stillness from noise, by the
immobility of all surrounding objects after the reeling landscape on
either hand the swaying train, by the bland and tempered light after
the harsh contrasts of glare and darkness so constantly offered to her
vision of late. She was dazed and faint, moreover, so that her knees
trembled, her sensibility, her powers of realisation and of sympathy,
for the time being, atrophied.

The house-steward ushered her into a large, square room. The low,
darkly-painted, vaulted ceiling of it produced a cavernous effect. An
orderly disorder prevailed, and a somewhat mournful dimness of closed,
green-slatted shutters and half-drawn curtains. The furniture, costly
in fact, but dwarfed, in some cases actually legless, was ranged
against the squat, carven bookcases that lined the walls, leaving the
middle of the room vacant save for a low, narrow camp-bed. The bed
stood at right angles to the door by which Katherine entered, the head
of it towards the shuttered, heavily-draped windows, the foot towards
the inside wall of the room. At the bedside a man knelt on one knee,
and his appearance aroused, in a degree, Katherine's dormant powers of
observation. He had a short, crisp, black beard and crisp, black hair.
He was alert and energetic of face and figure, a man of dare-devil,
humorous, yet kindly eyes. He wore a blue serge suit with brass buttons
to it. He was in his stocking-feet. The wristbands and turn-down collar
of his white