on and walked on, guided through the obscurity by
the line of light under his door. As he reached the threshold he heard a
little choking cry.

"John--oh, John!"

He paused.

"I can't _bear_ it!" The sobs increased.

"Bear what?"

"That you should hate me----"

"Don't be foolish," he said, groping for his door-handle.

"But you do hate me--and I deserve it!"

"Nonsense, dear. Try to sleep."

"I can't sleep till you've forgiven me. Say you don't hate me! I'll do
anything...only say you don't hate me!"

He stood still a moment, thinking; then he turned back, and made his way
across the room to her side. As he sat down beside her, he felt her arms
reach for his neck and her wet face press itself against his cheek.

"I'll do anything..." she sobbed; and in the darkness he held her to him
and hated his victory.

XIII

MRS. ANSELL was engaged in what she called picking up threads. She had
been abroad for the summer--had, in, fact, transferred herself but a few
hours earlier from her returning steamer to the little station at
Lynbrook--and was now, in the bright September afternoon, which left her
in sole possession of the terrace of Lynbrook House, using that pleasant
eminence as a point of observation from which to gather up some of the
loose ends of history dropped at her departure.

It might have been thought that the actual scene out-spread below
her--the descending gardens, the tennis-courts, the farm-lands sloping
away to the blue sea-like shimmer of the Hempstead plains--offered, at
the moment, little material for her purpose; but that was to view them
with a superficial eye. Mrs. Ansell's trained gaze was, for example,
greatly enlightened by the fact that the tennis-courts were fringed by a
group of people indolently watchful of the figures agitating themselves
about the nets; and that, as she turned her head toward the entrance
avenue, the receding view of a station omnibus, followed by a
luggage-cart, announced that more guests were to be added to those who
had almost taxed to its limits the expansibility of the luncheon-table.

All this, to the initiated eye, was full of suggestion; but its
significance was as nothing to that presented by the approach of two
figures which, as Mrs. Ansell watched, detached themselves from the
cluster about the tennis-ground and struck, obliquely and at a desultory
pace, across the lawn toward the terrace. The figures--those of a slight
young man with stoo