“At any time you could have called him to your side, and you knew it.  Now you have sent him away for always.”

During the week the sense of loss, the feeling that everything was unbearably incomplete, grew stronger and stronger within her.  She had no heart for the losing battle in which she was engaged.  A dangerous question began to force itself forward in her mind whenever her eyes rested upon Walter Hine.  “Was he worth while?” she asked herself:  though as yet she did not define all that the “while” connoted.  The question was most prominent in her mind on the seventh day after the letter had been sent.  She had persuaded Walter Hine to mount with her on to the down behind the house; they came to the great White Horse, and Hine, pleading fatigue, a plea which during these last days had been ever on his lips, flung himself down upon the grass.  For a little time Sylvia sat idly watching the great battle ships at firing-practice in the Bay.  It was an afternoon of August; a light haze hung in the still air softening the distant promontories; and on the waveless sparkling sea the great ships, coal-black to the eye, circled about the targets, with now and then a roar of thunder and a puff of smoke, like some monstrous engines of heat—­heat stifling and oppressive.  By sheer contrast, Sylvia began to dream of the cool glaciers; and the Chalet de Lognan suddenly stood visible before her eyes.  She watched the sunlight die off the red rocks of the Chardonnet, the evening come with silent feet across the snow, and the starlit night follow close upon its heels; night fled as she dreamed.  She saw the ice-slope on the Aiguille d’Argentiere, she could almost hear the chip-chip of the axes as the steps were cut and the perpetual hiss as the ice-fragments streamed down the slope.  Then she looked toward Walter Hine with the speculative inquiry which had come so often into her eyes of late.  And as she looked, she saw him furtively take from a pocket a tabloid or capsule and slip it secretly into his mouth.

“How long have you been taking cocaine?” she asked, suddenly.

Walter Hine flushed scarlet and turned to her with a shrinking look.

“I don’t,” he stammered.

“Yet you left a bottle of the drug where I found it.”

“That was not mine,” said he, still more confused.  “That was Archie Parminter’s.  He left it behind.”

“Yes,” said Sylvia, finding here a suspicion confirmed.  “But he left it for you?”

“And if I did take it,” said Hine, turning irritably to her, “what can it matter to you?  I believe that what your father says is true.”

“What does he say?”

“That you care for Captain Chayne, and that it’s no use for any one else to think of you.”

Sylvia started.

“Oh, he says that!”

She understood now one of the methods of the new intrigue.  Sylvia was in love with Chayne; therefore Walter Hine may console himself with cocaine.  It was not Garratt Skinner who suggested it.  Oh, no!  But Archie Parminter is invited for the night, takes the drug himself, or pretends to take it, praises it, describes how the use of it has grown in the West End and amongst the clubs, and then conveniently leaves the drug behind, and no doubt supplies it as it is required.