Philip let the pen slip at last from his tired fingers.  The light had failed.  He had been writing with straining eyes, almost in the darkness.  But there was something else.  Had it been fancy or ...  This time there could be no mistake.  He had not heard the lift stop, but some one was knocking softly at the door, softly but persistently.  He turned his head.  The room seemed filled with shadows.  He had written for hours, and he was conscious that his limbs were stiff.  The sun had gone down in a cloudy sky, and the light had faded.  He could scarcely distinguish the articles of furniture at the further end of the room.  For some reason or other he felt tongue-tied.  Then, without any answer from him to this mysterious summons, the handle of the door slowly turned.  As he sat there he saw it pushed open.  A woman, wrapped in a long coat, stepped inside, closing it firmly behind her.  She stood peering around the room.  There was something familiar and yet unfamiliar in her height, her carriage.  He waited, spellbound, for her voice.

“Douglas!” she exclaimed.  “Ah, there you are!”

The words seemed to die away, unuttered, upon his lips.  He suddenly thought that he was choking.  He stared at her blankly.  It was impossible!  She came a step further into the room.  Her hand was stretched out accusingly.

“So I’ve found you, have I, Douglas?” she cried, and there was a note of bitter triumph in her words, “found you after all these months!  Aren’t you terrified?  Aren’t you afraid?  No wonder you sit there, shrinking away!  Do you know what I have come for?”

He tried to speak, but his lips were as powerless to frame words as his limbs were to respond to his desire for movement.  This was the one thing which he had not foreseen.

“You broke your promise,” she went on, raising her voice a little in passionate reproach.  “You left me there alone to face dismissal, without a penny, and slipped off yourself to America.  You never even came in to wish me good-by.  Why?  Tell me why you went without coming near me?...  You won’t, eh?  You daren’t.  Be a man.  Out with it.  I am here, and I know the truth.”

For the first time some definite sound came from his lips.

“Beatrice!” he gasped.

“Ah!” she mocked.  “You can remember my name, then?  Douglas, I knew that you were a bad man.  I knew that when you told me how you meant to cheat your creditors, how you meant to escape over here on the pretext of business, and bring all the money you could scrape together.  I knew that, and yet I was willing to come with you, and I should have come.  But there was one thing I didn’t reckon upon.  I didn’t know that you had the heart or the courage to be a murderer!”

The little cry that broke from his lips was stifled even before it was uttered.