“Letters?” said Chris curiously.

“M.  Bertrand is my secretary,” said Mordaunt quietly.

“Oh, is he?  And you never told me!  But what a splendid idea!” Chris stood between the two men, flushed, eager, charming.  “I’m so glad, Bertie,” she said impulsively.  “You may think yourself very lucky.  Mr. Mordaunt is quite the nicest man in the world.”

Bertrand bowed low.  “I believe it,” he said simply.

“Then we shall see quite a lot of each other,” went on Chris.  “That will be great fun—­just like old times.  Oh, must I really go?  I don’t want to at all, and nothing will make me sorry that I came.”  She threw a gay smile at her fiance, and withdrew her hand to give it to the friend of her childhood. “Au revoir, preux chevalier!  You will come to my birthday party?  Promise!” Then, as he still shook his head:  “Trevor, if you don’t bring him, I shall come all by myself and fetch him.”

“No, you mustn’t do that,” Mordaunt answered with decision.

“Then will you bring him?”

“I will do my best,” he promised gravely.

“Will you really?  Oh, thank you, Trevor.  I shall expect you then, Bertie.  Good-bye!”

Her hand lay for a couple of seconds in his, and he bent low over it, but he did not speak in answer.

She went out of the room with the silent Englishman.  He heard her laughing as they went downstairs.  He heard her gay young voice a while longer in the hall below.  Then came the throb of a motor and the closing of the street door.  She was gone.

He stood quite motionless, listening to the taxi as it whirred away.  And even after he ceased to hear it he did not move.  He was gazing straight before him, and his eyes were the eyes of a man in a dream.  They saw naught.

Stiffly at last he moved, and something like a shudder went through him.  He crossed the room heavily, with the gait of one stricken suddenly old.  He sat down again at the writing-table, and took up the pen that he had dropped—­how long ago!

He even wrote a few words slowly, laboriously, still with that fixed look in his eyes.  Then quite suddenly he was assailed by a violent tremor.  He pushed back his chair with a sharp exclamation, half-rose, then as swiftly flung himself forward and lay across the table, face downwards, gasping horribly, almost choking.  His hands were clenched, and hammered upon the papers littered there.  The pen rolled unheeded over the polished wood and fell upon the floor.

Seconds passed into minutes.  Gradually the bony fists ceased their convulsive tattoo.  The laboured breathing grew less agonized.  The man’s rigid pose relaxed.  But still he lay with his arms outspread and his head bowed between them, a silent image of despair.

Slowly the minutes crawled by.  Down in the street below a newsboy was yelling unintelligibly, and in the distance a barrel-organ jangled the latest music-hall craze; but he was deep, deep in an abyss of suffering, very far below the surface of things.  There was something almost boyishly forlorn in his attitude.  With his face hidden, he looked pathetically young.