“Gipsy is right, she always is,” he thought.  “She is finer-minded, better, more generous than I am.  Her mind could not harbour one doubt of anyone she loved, and I—­” He frowned.

Helen Everard, from an upper window, saw his arrival, and watching him as he drove up the approach to the house, marked the frown on his brow, the lack of his usual cheerfulness.

“There is something wrong; there seems to be nothing, but something wrong all the time,” she thought with a sigh.

“If, after all the trouble I have taken, my plans should come to nothing, I shall be bitterly disappointed.  I blame Connie.  Con’s unworldliness is simply silly.  Oh, these people!”

“It is a long time since I saw you, Johnny—­four or five days, isn’t it?” Joan said.  She held out her hand to him, and he took it.  He seemed to hesitate, and then drew a little closer and kissed her cheek.

Something wrong.  She too saw it, but it did not disturb her as it did Helen.

“Yes, four days—­five—­I forget,” he said, scarcely realising what an admission was this from him, who awhile ago had counted every hour jealously that had kept them apart.

For a few minutes they talked of indifferent things, each knowing it for a preliminary of something to follow.

He had come to tell her something, Joan felt.

“She has something to say to me,” Johnny knew.  So for a few minutes they fenced, and then it was he who broke away.

He rose, and began to move about the room, as a man disturbed in his mind usually does.  She sat calm and expectant, watching him, a faint smile on her lips, a kindness and a gentleness in her face that made it inexpressibly sweet.

“I think, Johnny, you have something to say to me.”

“Something that I hate saying.  Joan, last night a man—­a man I have never seen before—­came to see me.”

She stiffened.  The faint smile was gone; her face had become as a mask, hard and cold, icy.

“Yes?”

“A man who had something to tell me—­you will do me the justice to believe that I did not wish to hear him, that I tried to silence him, but he would not be silenced.  He told me lies! foul lies about you! lies!” Johnny said passionately, “things which I, knowing you, know to be untrue.  Yet he told them.  I drove him out of the place.  Then he came back.  He had remembered what his errand was—­blackmail.  He came to me for money.  But—­but he did not stay, and then—­” Johnny paused.  He had reached the window, and stood staring out into the garden, yet seeing nothing of its beauty.

“You know,” he went on, “that I do not ask you nor expect you to deny—­there is no need.  What he said I know to be untrue.  The man was a villain, one of the lowest, but he has been paid.”

“Paid?” she said.  She stared.

“Not in money,” Johnny said shortly, “in another way.”

“You—­you struck him?”