He looked up, startled by a sudden change in her breathing.  She was standing opposite him; she seemed to be keeping herself upright by her hands pressed palms downwards on the table.  The telegram was spread open there before her; and she was not looking at it; she was looking straight at him, but without seeing him.  Her mouth was so tightly closed that it might have been the pressure of her lips that drove the blood from them; she breathed heavily through her nostrils, her small thin breast heaving without a sob.  In her face there was neither sorrow nor terror, and he could see that there was no thought in her brain, and that all the life in her body was gathered into her swollen, labouring heart.  And as he looked at her he was pierced with a great pang of pity.

She stood there so, supporting herself by her hands for about a minute.  He was certain that no sense of his presence reached her across the gulf of her unknown and immeasurable anguish.

At last she drew her hands from the table, first one, then the other, slowly, as if she were dragging a weight; her body swayed, and he sprang to his feet with an inarticulate murmur, and held out one arm to steady her.  At his touch her perishing will revived and her faintness passed from her.  She put him gently aside and went slowly out of the room.

As he turned to the table the five words of her telegram stared him in the face:  “Your father died this morning.”

It would have been horrible if he had told her.

His first thought was for her; and he thanked Heaven that had tied his tongue.  Then, try as he would to realize her suffering, it eluded him; he could only feel that a moment ago she had been with him, standing there and smiling, and that now he was alone.  He could still feel her hand pushing against his outstretched arm.  There had been nothing to wound him in that gesture of repulse; it was as if she had accepted rather than refused his touch, as if her numbed body took from it the impetus it craved.

There was a sound of hurry and confusion in the house; servants went up and downstairs, or stood about whispering in the passages.  He heard footsteps in that room above him which he knew to be her room.  A bell rang once; he could feel the vibration of the wire down the wall of the library.  It was her bell and he wondered if she were ill.

Robert rushed in with a wild white face, shaken out of his respectful calm.  He was asking Rickman if he had seen this month’s Bradshaw.  They joined in a frenzied search for it.

She was not ill; she was going away.

A few minutes later he heard the sound of wheels grating on the gravel drive, of the front door being flung open, of her voice, her sweet quiet voice, then the grating of the wheels again, and she was gone.  That, of course, ended it.

Now for the first time he realized what Sir Frederick’s death meant for himself.  In thus snatching her from him in the very crisis of confession it had taken away his chance of redeeming his dishonour.