After lunch we went up to the sitting-room.  I meant to stay for half an hour before going back to Versailles.

Telegrams called Lady Tilchester away for a little.  She is always so full of business.

“I shall send Muriel to entertain you while I answer these,” she said.  “I brought her over with me to have a glimpse of Paris, too.”

In a few moments the sound of feet running down the passage caused me to turn round as the door opened and a slender child of ten or eleven entered the room.  She was facing the light.  I happened to be standing with my back to the window.

“How do you do?” she said, sweetly, and put out her little hand.  “Mother says I may come and talk to you.”

There are some moments in life too anguishing for words!

Her face is the face of Lady Tilchester, but her eyes—­her eyes are grayish-greeny-blue, with black edges, and that look like a cat’s, that can see in the dark.

Now I know whom her photograph reminded me of.

There can be only one other pair of such eyes in the world.

I don’t remember what I said.  Something kind and banal.  Then I invented an excuse to go away.

“Give my best love to your mother, dear,” I said, “and say I must not stop another moment.  I have remembered an important appointment with the dressmaker, and I must fly!”

She put up her mignonne oval face to kiss me.

“I have heard so much of you,” she said.  “I wanted so to see you.  I wish you could have stayed.”  And so we kissed and parted.

When I got into the automobile outside, I felt as if I were going to faint for a few awful moments.  Everything was clear to me now!  I remembered the little photograph on his mantel-piece, his sudden changing of the conversation, a number of small things unnoticed at the time.  How had I been so ridiculously blind?  It was because she seemed so great and noble, and utterly apart from all these things.

Had it been Babykins or Lady Grenellen, or any other woman, this discovery would have made no difference to me.  I did not doubt that Antony loved me, and me only, now.  He had been “not wearyingly faithful,” like the rest of his world, that was all.

But she—­Lady Tilchester—­my friend!  Oh, I could not take her lover from her!  She who had always been so good to me, from the first moment of our acquaintance, kind and sympathetic and dear!  I owed her deepest gratitude.  If one of us must suffer, it should certainly be I. I could not play her false like this.  Of course she loved him still!  He was often with her, I knew, and her face had softened when first she spoke of him.  They had known each other for fourteen years, she had said.  I seemed to see it all.  This was her “mid-summer madness,” and Antony had gone away to travel for several years, and then returned to her again.  They had probably been so happy together until I came upon the scene.