An envelope was lying on his table.  It cost him a great effort to open it.

’I have received your letter.  There is nothing to say, except that I must see you.  I wish to keep what you have told me from my father, for the present, at any rate.  There would be no possibility of our talking here.  We have only one sitting-room, and my sister is there all the time.  I will be at the Bosquet d’Apollon, by 11.30.’

Only that!  He stared at the delicate, almost invisible writing.  The moment he had dreaded for twelve years had arrived; and the world still went on, and quiet notes like that could still be written.

Long before the hour fixed he was in the Bosquet d’Apollon, walking up and down in front of the famous grotto, on whose threshold the white Apollo, just released from the chariot of the Sun, receives the ministrations of the Muses, while his divine horses are being fed and stalled in the hollows of the rock to either side.  No stranger fancy than this ever engaged the architects and squandered the finances of the Builder-King.  Reared in solid masonry on bare sandy ground now entirely disguised, the artificial rock that holds the grotto towers to a great height, crowned by ancient trees, weathered by wind and rain, overgrown by leaf and grass, and laved at its base by clear water.  All round, the trees stand close—­the lawns spread their quiet slopes.  On this sparkling autumn morning, a glory of russet, amber, and red, begirt the white figures and the gleaming grotto.  The Immortals, the champing horses, locked behind their grilles lest the tourist should insult them—­all the queer crumbling romance of the statuary, all the natural beauty of leaf and water, of the white clouds overhead and their reflexions below—­combined to make Fenwick’s guilty bewilderment more complete, to turn all life to dream, and all its figures into the puppets of a shadow-play.

A light step on the grass.  A shock passed through him.  He made a movement, then checked it.

Eugenie paused at some distance from him.  In this autumnal moment of the year, and on week-days, scarcely any passing visitor disturbs the quiet of the Bosquet d’Apollon.  In its deep dell of trees and grass, they were absolutely alone; the sunlight which dappled the white bodies of the Muses, and shone on the upstretched arm of Apollo, seemed the only thing of life besides themselves.

She threw back her veil as she came near him—­her long widow’s veil, which to-day she had resumed.  Beneath it, framed in it, the face appeared of an ivory rigidity and pallor.  The eyes only were wild and living as she came up to him, clasping her hands, evidently shrinking from him—­yet composed.

’There is one thing more I want to know.  If I have ever been your friend!—­if you have ever felt any kindness for me, tell me—­tell me frankly—­why did your wife leave you?’

Fenwick’s face fell.  Had she come so soon to this point?—­by the sureness of her own instinct?