a sign that he didn’t want to be touched.  It was the last gesture he made.  I hung over him and then—­and then I nearly ran out of the house just as I was, in my night-gown.  I think if I had been dressed I would have run out of the garden, into the street—­run away altogether.  I had never seen death.  I may say I had never heard of it.  I wanted to run from it.”

She paused for a long, quiet breath.  The harmonized sweetness and daring of her face was made pathetic by her downcast eyes.

“Fuir la mort,” she repeated, meditatively, in her mysterious voice.

Mills’ big head had a little movement, nothing more.  Her glance glided for a moment towards me like a friendly recognition of my right to be there, before she began again.

“My life might have been described as looking at mankind from a fourth-floor window for years.  When the end came it was like falling out of a balcony into the street.  It was as sudden as that.  Once I remember somebody was telling us in the Pavilion a tale about a girl who jumped down from a fourth-floor window. . .  For love, I believe,” she interjected very quickly, “and came to no harm.  Her guardian angel must have slipped his wings under her just in time.  He must have.  But as to me, all I know is that I didn’t break anything—­not even my heart.  Don’t be shocked, Mr. Mills.  It’s very likely that you don’t understand.”

“Very likely,” Mills assented, unmoved.  “But don’t be too sure of that.”

“Henry Allegre had the highest opinion of your intelligence,” she said unexpectedly and with evident seriousness.  “But all this is only to tell you that when he was gone I found myself down there unhurt, but dazed, bewildered, not sufficiently stunned.  It so happened that that creature was somewhere in the neighbourhood.  How he found out. . .  But it’s his business to find out things.  And he knows, too, how to worm his way in anywhere.  Indeed, in the first days he was useful and somehow he made it look as if Heaven itself had sent him.  In my distress I thought I could never sufficiently repay. . .  Well, I have been paying ever since.”

“What do you mean?” asked Mills softly.  “In hard cash?”

“Oh, it’s really so little,” she said.  “I told you it wasn’t the worst case.  I stayed on in that house from which I nearly ran away in my nightgown.  I stayed on because I didn’t know what to do next.  He vanished as he had come on the track of something else, I suppose.  You know he really has got to get his living some way or other.  But don’t think I was deserted.  On the contrary.  People were coming and going, all sorts of people that Henry Allegre used to know—­or had refused to know.  I had a sensation of plotting and intriguing around me, all the time.  I was feeling morally bruised, sore all over, when, one day, Don Rafael de Villarel sent in his card.  A grandee.  I didn’t know him, but, as you are aware, there was hardly a personality of mark