“Dell, my good fellow, I want your help.  I have just met my wife here—­Lady Kitty.  You understand.  Neither of us, of course, had any idea.  Lady Kitty is very ill.  We wish to have a conversation—­uninterrupted.  I trust you to keep guard.”

The young man, son of one of the Haggart gardeners, started and flushed, then gave his master a look of sympathy.

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

Ashe nodded and went back to the next room.  He closed the door behind him.  Kitty, who was sitting by the fire, half rose.  Their eyes met.  Then with a stifled cry he flung himself down, kneeling beside her, and she sank into his arms.  His tears fell on her face, anguish and pity overwhelmed him.

“You may!” she said, brokenly, putting up her hand to his cheek, and kissing him—­“you may!  I’m not mad or wicked now—­and I’m dying!”

Agonized murmurs of love, pardon, self-abasement passed between them.  It was as though a great stream bore them on its breast; an awful and majestic power enwrapped them, and made each word, each kiss, wonderful, sacramental.  He drew himself away at last, holding her hair back from her brow and temples, studying her features, his own face convulsed.

“Where have you been?  Why did you hide from me?”

“You forbade me,” she said, stroking his hair.  “And it was quite right.  The dear Dean told me—­and I quite understood.  If I’d gone to Haggart then there’d have been more trouble.  I should have tried to get my old place back.  And now it’s all over.  You can give me all I want, because I can’t live.  It’s only a question of months, perhaps weeks.  Nobody could blame you, could they?  People don’t laugh when—­it’s death.  It simplifies things so—­doesn’t it?”

She smiled, and nestled to him again.

“What do you mean?” he said, almost violently.  “Why are you so ill?”

“It was Bosnia first, and then—­being miserable—­I suppose.  And Poitiers was very cold—­and the nuns very stuffy, bless them—­they wouldn’t let me have air enough.”

He groaned aloud while he remembered his winter in London, in the forlorn luxury of the Park Lane house.

“Where have you been?” he repeated.

“Oh!  I went to the Soeurs Blanches—­you remember?—­where I used to be.  You went there, didn’t you?”—­he made a sign of miserable assent—­“but I made them promise not to tell!  There was an old mistress of novices there still who used to be very fond of me.  She got one of the houses of the Sacre Coeur to take me in—­at Poitiers.  They thought they were gathering a stray sheep back into the fold, you understand, as I was brought up a Catholic—­of sorts.  And I didn’t mind!” The familiar intonation, soft, complacent, humorous, rose like a ghost between them.  “I used to like going to mass.  But this Easter they wanted to make me ’go to my duties’—­you know what it means?—­and I wouldn’t.  I wanted to confess.”  She shuddered and