Janet stirred a little, uneasily.  She hated silence—­that terrible, empty space waiting to be filled up with your thoughts—­why, the idlest chatter spared you that.  She hated the terrace, too—­she closed her eyes to shut out the ugly darkness that was pressing against her; behind the shelter of her lids it was cooler and stiller, but open-eyed or closed, she could not shut out memory.  The very touch of the bricks beneath her feet brought back that late October day.  She had been sitting curled up on the steps in the warm sunlight, with the keen, sweet air stirring her hair and sending the beech-leaves dancing down the flagged path—­there had been a heavenly smell of burning from the far meadow, and she was sniffing it luxuriously, feeling warm and joyous and protected in Jerry’s great tweed coat—­watching the tall figure swinging across from the lodge gate with idle, happy eyes—­not even curious.  It was not until he had almost reached the steps that she had noticed that he was wearing a foreign uniform—­and even then she had promptly placed him as one of Rosemary’s innumerable conquests, bestowing on him a friendly and inquiring smile.

“Were you looking for Miss Langdon?” Even now she could see the courteous, grave young face soften as he turned quickly toward her, baring his dark head with that swift foreign grace that turns our perfunctory habits into something like a ritual.

“But no,” he had said gently, “I was looking for you, Miss Abbott.”

“Now will you please tell me how in the world you knew that I was Miss Abbott?”

And he had smiled—­with his lips, not his eyes.

“I should be dull indeed if that I did not know.  I am Philippe Laurent, Miss Abbott.”

And “Oh,” she had cried joyously, “Liane’s Philippe!”

“But yes—­Liane’s Philippe.  They are not here, the others?  Madame Langdon, the little Miss Rosemary?”

“No, they’ve gone to some parish fair, and I’ve been wicked and stayed home.  Won’t you sit down and talk to me?  Please!”

“Miss Abbott, it is not to you that I must talk.  What I have to say is indeed most difficult, and it is to Jeremy’s Janie that I would say it.  May I, then?”

It had seemed to Jeremy’s Janie that the voice in which she answered him came from a great distance, but she never took her eyes from the grave and vivid face.

“Yes.  And quickly, please.”

So he had told her—­quickly—­in his exquisitely careful English, and she had listened as attentively and politely, huddled up on the brick steps in the sunlight, as though he were running over the details of the last drive, instead of tearing her life to pieces with every word.  She remembered now that it hadn’t seemed real at all—­if it had been to Jerry that these horrors had happened could she have sat there so quietly, feeling the colour bright in her cheeks, and the wind stirring in her hair, and the sunlight warm on her hands?  Why, for less than this people screamed, and fainted, and went raving mad!