ould have been of
getting the small hand axe out of the woodshed, aiming a blow at the
cup, and hitting the cup.

He thought, "I started to break that cup when I rustled the newspaper at
breakfast. I went on when I suddenly came back and got into that
niggling business over why I had come back. Went on when I walked off to
my room after that letter business. Practically took up the axe when I
couldn't say, 'Well, how's the Garden Home going on?' at dinner. And
smashed it when I chaffed about Bagshaw an hour ago. Rum business!
Rotten business."

That was the day's epitaph. But for the murder of the cup he found--gone
to bed and lying awake--a culprit other than himself. He thought, "It
was meeting Nona made me come home like that. But if that had been the
first time I'd ever met Nona I shouldn't have returned. So it goes back
further than that. Nine--ten years. The day she married Tybar. If she
hadn't married Tybar she'd have married me. The cup wouldn't have been
broken. Nona broke that cup."

CHAPTER IV

I

These events were on a Monday. On the following Thursday Nona came to
see him at his office.

She was announced through the speaking-tube on his desk:

"Lady Tybar to see you, sir."

Nona! But he was not really surprised. He had taken no notice of her
letter. He had wanted to go up to Northrepps to see her, but he had not
been. When two days passed and still he prevented himself from going, he
began to have the feeling--somehow--that she would come to see him. It
was the third day and she was here, downstairs.

"Ask her to come up," he said.

She came in. She wore (as Sabre saw it) "a pale-blue sort of thing" and
"a sort of black hat." He had considered it as an odd thing, in his
thoughts of her since their meeting, that, though he could always have
some kind of notion what other women were wearing, he never could
remember any detail of Nona's dress.

But it was her face he always looked at.

She stood still immediately she was across the threshold and the door
closed behind her. She was smiling as though she felt herself to be up
to some lark. "Hullo, Marko. Don't you hate me for coming in here like
this?"

"It's jolly surprising."

"That's another way of saying it. Now if you'd said it was surprisingly
jolly! Well, shake hands, Marko, and pretend you're glad."

He laughed and put out his hand. But she delayed response; she first
slipped off the gauntlets she was wearing and then gave him