“Show me the silkworms,” he said.

They entered the lofty shed rising above a thicket behind the villa—­a shuttered apartment where twilight reigned.  The place was fitted with shelves to the ceiling and between the caterpillar trays tall branches of brushwood ascended to the roof.  Out of the cool gloom of this silent chamber there glimmered, as it seemed, a thousand little lamps dotted everywhere on the sticks and walls and ceiling.  Not a place where a worm could climb or spin was unadorned, for the oval, shining cocoons, scattered like small, ripe fruit upon the twigs, made a delicate light on every side through the sombre dusk.  Mr. Redmayne’s silkworms were descended, through countless generations, from those historic eggs stolen by Nestorian pilgrims from China, and carried thence secretly in hollow canes to Constantinople some thirteen hundred years before.

The caterpillars had nearly all done their work and completed their silken cases; but a couple of hundred, fat, white monsters, each some three inches long, still remained in the trays, and they fastened greedily on fresh mulberry leaves that Jenny brought them.  Others were but beginning their shrouds.  They had sketched them and appeared to be busily weaving in the preliminary bag made of transparent and glittering filament.  A few of the creatures began to turn yellow, though as yet they had not devoured their last meal.  Jenny picked them up and held them to the morning light.

“Never mummy was wound so exquisitely as the silkworm’s chrysalis,” said Peter; and Jenny chatted cheerfully about the silken industry and its varied interests, but found that Mr. Ganns could tell her much more than she was able to tell him.

He listened with attention, however, and only by gradual stages deflected conversation to the affairs that had brought him.  Presently he indicated an aspect of her own position arising from his words on the previous night.

“Did it ever strike you that it was a bold thing to marry within little more than nine months of your first husband’s disappearance, Mrs. Doria?” he asked.

“It did not; but I shivered when I heard you talking yesterday.  And call me ‘Jenny,’ not ‘Mrs. Doria,’ Mr. Ganns.”

“Love has always been very impatient of law”; he declared, “but the fact is that unless proof of an exceptional character can be submitted, the English law is not prepared to say of any man that he is dead until seven years have passed from the last record of him among the living.  Now there is rather a serious difference between seven years and nine months, Jenny.”

“Looking back I seem to see nothing but a long nightmare.  ’Nine months!’ It was a century.  Don’t think that I didn’t love my first husband; I adored him and I adore his memory; but the loneliness and the sudden magic of this man.  Besides all that, surely none could question the hideous proofs of what happened?  I accepted Michael’s death as a fact which need not enter the calculation.  My God!  Why did not somebody hint to me that I was doing wrong to wed?”