“Do I disturb you, Lewis?” she asked softly.

“No, my dear.”

There was a change in the tone of his voice, which his wife’s quick ear detected.  “I am afraid you are not well,” she said anxiously.

“I am a little tired after our long ride to-day.  Do you want to go back to the Belvidere?”

“Not without you.  Shall I leave you to rest here?”

He seemed not to hear the question.  There he sat, with his head hanging down, the shadowy counterfeit of an old man.  In her anxiety, Stella approached him, and put her hand caressingly on his head.  It was burning hot.  “O!” she cried, “you are ill, and you are trying to hide it from me.”

He put his arm round her waist and made her sit on his knee.  “Nothing is the matter with me,” he said, with an uneasy laugh.  “What have you got in your hand?  A letter?”

“Yes.  Addressed to you and not opened yet.”  He took it out of her hand, and threw it carelessly on a sofa near him.  “Never mind that now!  Let us talk.”  He paused, and kissed her, before he went on.  “My darling, I think you must be getting tired of Vange?”

“Oh, no!  I can be happy anywhere with you—­and especially at Vange.  You don’t how this noble old house interests me, and how I admire the glorious country all round it.”

He was not convinced.  “Vange is very dull,” he said, obstinately; “and your friends will be wanting to see you.  Have you heard from your mother lately?”

“No.  I am surprised she has not written.”

“She has not forgiven us for getting married so quietly,” he went on.  “We had better go back to London and make our peace with her.  Don’t you want to see the house my aunt left me at Highgate?”

Stella sighed.  The society of the man she loved was society enough for her.  Was he getting tired of his wife already?  “I will go with you wherever you like.”  She said those words in tones of sad submission, and gently got up from his knee.

He rose also, and took from the sofa the letter which he had thrown on it.  “Let us see what our friends say,” he resumed.  “The address is in Loring’s handwriting.”

As he approached the table on which the lamp was burning, she noticed that he moved with a languor that was new in her experience of him.  He sat down and opened the letter.  She watched him with an anxiety which had now become intensified to suspicion.  The shade of the lamp still prevented her from seeing his face plainly.  “Just what I told you,” he said; “the Lorings want to know when they are to see us in London; and your mother says she ’feels like that character in Shakespeare who was cut by his own daughters.’  Read it.”

He handed her the letter.  In taking it, she contrived to touch the lamp shade, as if by accident, and tilted it so that the full flow of the light fell on him.  He started back—­but not before she had seen the ghastly pallor on his face.  She had not only heard it from Lady Loring, she knew from his own unreserved confession to her what that startling change really meant.  In an instant she was on her knees at his feet.  “Oh, my darling,” she cried, “it was cruel to keep that secret from your wife!  You have heard it again!”