ressed the
little bare patch of palm left open by the glove to her face, to see
whether it was indeed her own cheek flaming so.

The door had been opened by some unseen agency, disclosing a passage and
flight of stairs covered by a red carpet, at the foot of which lay an
old, tangled, brown-white dog full of fleas and sorrow. Unreasoning
terror seized on Barbara; her body remained rigid, but her spirit began
flying back across the Green Park, to the very hall of Valleys House.
Then she saw coming towards her a youngish woman in a blue apron, with
mild, reddened eyes.

"Is this where Mr. Courtier lives?"

"Yes, miss." The teeth of the young woman were few in number and rather
black; and Barbara could only stand there saying nothing, as if her body
had been deserted between the sunlight and this dim red passage, which
led to-what?

The woman spoke again:

"I'm sorry if you was wanting him, miss, he's just gone away."

Barbara felt a movement in her heart, like the twang and quiver of an
elastic band, suddenly relaxed. She bent to stroke the head of the old
dog, who was smelling her shoes. The woman said:

"And, of course, I can't give you his address, because he's gone to
foreign parts."

With a murmur, of whose sense she knew nothing, Barbara hurried out into
the sunshine. Was she glad? Was she sorry? At the corner of the street
she turned and looked back; the two heads, of the woman and the dog,
were there still, poked out through the doorway.

A horrible inclination to laugh seized her, followed by as horrible a
desire to cry.

CHAPTER XXVI

By the river the West wind, whose murmuring had visited Courtier and
Miltoun the night before, was bringing up the first sky of autumn.
Slow-creeping and fleecy grey, the clouds seemed trying to overpower
a sun that shone but fitfully even thus early in the day. While Audrey
Noel was dressing sunbeams danced desperately on the white wall, like
little lost souls with no to-morrow, or gnats that wheel and wheel in
brief joy, leaving no footmarks on the air. Through the chinks of a
side window covered by a dark blind some smoky filaments of light
were tethered to the back of her mirror. Compounded of trembling grey
spirals, so thick to the eye that her hand felt astonishment when
it failed to grasp them, and so jealous as ghosts of the space they
occupied, they brought a moment's distraction to a heart not happy.
For how could she be happy, her lover away from her