med to supply their empty frames with the presentment of actual
warriors. I looked down upon the table, all agleam with flowers, and
fruit, and silver, over which shone the red glow of the shaded lamps.
Exactly opposite to me, in that chair now pushed carelessly back, she
had sat, so close that my hand could have touched hers at any moment, so
close that I had been able to wonder more than ever before at the
marvellous whiteness of her skin, the perfection of her small,
finely-shaped features, the strange sphinxlike expression of her face,
always suggestive of some great self-restraint, mysterious, and subtly
stimulating. And as I stood there she seemed again to be occupying the
chair, at first a faint shadowy presence, but gaining with every second
shape and outline, until I could scarcely persuade myself that it was
not she who sat there, she whose eyes more than once during dinner-time
had looked into mine with that curious and instinctive demand for
sympathy, even as regards the things of the moment, the passing jest,
the most transitory of emotions. A few minutes ago I had felt that I
knew her better than ever before in my life, and now the chair was
empty. My heart was beating at the imaginary presence of the vainest of
shadows. She was going to marry Colonel Mostyn Ray.

And then I stood as though suddenly turned to stone. Before me were the
great front windows of the castle. Beyond, eastwards, stretched the
salt marshes, the salt marshes riven with creeks. Once more my
unwilling hands touched that huddled-up heap of extinct humanity. I saw
the dead white face, which the sun could never warm again, and I felt
the hands, cold, clammy, horrible. Ray was a soldier, and life and
death had become phrases to him; but I--it was the first dead man I had
ever seen, and the horror of it was cold in my blood. Ray had murdered
him, fought with him, perhaps, but killed him. What would she say if
she knew? Would his hands be clean to her, or would the horror rise up
like a red wall between them?

"Will you take coffee, sir?"

I set my teeth and turned slowly round. I even took the cup from the
tray without spilling it.

"What liqueur may I bring you, sir?" the man asked.

"Brandy," I answered.

In a few minutes I was laughing at myself, not quite naturally, perhaps,
but only I could know that. I was getting to be a morbid, nervous
person. It was the solitude! I must get away from it all before long.
Fate had been playin