His face changed a little, but still she could not read his look.  “Sit down!” he said.  “We must have a talk.”

She put out her hand to him.  The aloofness of his speech cut her with an anguish intolerable.  “What has happened?” she said.  “Quick!  Tell me!  Don’t you want to—­marry me?”

He took her hand.  She saw that in some fashion he was moved, though still she could not understand.  “I’m trying to tell you,” he said; “but—­to be honest—­you’ve hit me in the wind, and I don’t know how.  I think you have forgotten in all these years what Guy was like.”

She gazed at him blankly.  Again Jeffcott’s words were running in her mind.  And something—­something hidden behind them—­arose up like a menace and terrified her.

“I haven’t forgotten,” she whispered voicelessly.  “I couldn’t forget.  But go on!  Don’t—­don’t mind telling me!”

She was white to the lips.  All the blood in her body seemed concentrated at her heart.  It was beating in heavy, sickening throbs like the labouring of some clogged machinery.

He put his free hand on her shoulder with an abrupt movement that made him for the moment oddly familiar.  “It’s a damned shame,” he said, and though his voice was low he spoke with feeling.  “Look here, child!  This is no fault of mine.  I never thought you could make this mistake, never dreamed of such a possibility.  I’m not Guy at all.  I am Burke Ranger—­his cousin.  And let me tell you at once, we are not much alike now—­whatever we have been in the past.  Here, don’t faint!  Sit down!”

He shifted his hand from her shoulder to her elbow, and supported her to a chair.  But she remained upon her feet, her white face upraised, gazing at him—­gazing at him.

“Not Guy!  Not Guy!” She said it over and over as if to convince herself.  Then:  “But where is Guy?” She clutched at his arm desperately, for all her world was shaking.  “Are you going to tell me he is—­dead?”

“No.”  Burke Ranger spoke with steady eyes looking straight into hers.  “He is not.”

“Then why—­then why—­” She could get no further.  She stopped, gasping.  His face swam blurred before her quivering vision,—­Guy’s face, yet with an inexplicable something in it that was not Guy.

“Sit down!” he said again, and put her with quiet insistence into the chair.  “Wait till you have had something to eat!  Then we’ll have a talk and decide what had better be done.”

She was shivering from head to foot, but she faced him still.  “I can’t eat,” she said through white lips.  “I can’t do anything till—­till I know—­all there is to know.”

He stood looking down at her.  The fingers of his right hand were working a little, but his face was perfectly calm, even grim.

As he did not speak immediately, she went on with piteous effort.  “You must forgive me for making that stupid mistake.  I see now—­you are not Guy, though there is a strong likeness.  You see, I have not seen Guy for five years, and I—­I was allowing for certain changes.”