As he walked away from Captain Graham’s eyrie he met Sir Chichester Splay in Pall Mall.

“Where have you been these eight months?” inquired Sir Chichester. “’The Dark Tower’ is still running, I see.  A good play, Mr. Hillyard.”

“But not a great play, of course,” said Martin, his lips twitching to a smile.

“I have been looking for you everywhere,” remarked Sir Chichester.  “You must stay with us for Goodwood.  My wife will never forgive me if I don’t secure you.”

Hillyard gladly consented.  It would be his first visit to the high racecourse on the downs—­and—­and he might find Stella Croyle among the company.  It would be a little easier for him and for her too, if they met this second time in a house of many visitors.  He had no comfortable news to give to her, and he had shrunk from seeking her out in the Bayswater Road.  Wrap the truth in words however careful, he could not but wound her.  Yet sooner or later she must hear of his return, and avoidance of her would but tell the story more cruelly than his lips.

“Yes, I will gladly come,” he said, “if I may come down on the first day.”

He was delayed in London until midday, and so motored after luncheon through Guildford and Chiddingfold and Petworth to Rackham Park.  The park ran down to the Midhurst Road, and when Hillyard was shown into the drawing-room he walked across to the window and looked out over a valley of fields and hedges and low, dark ridges to the downs lying blue in the sunlight and the black forests on their slopes.

From an embrasure a girl rose with a book in her hand.

“Let me introduce myself, Mr. Hillyard.  I am Joan Whitworth, and make my home here with my aunt.  They are all at Goodwood, of course, but they should be back at any moment.”

She rang the bell and ordered tea.  Somewhere Hillyard realised he had seen the girl before.  She was about eighteen years old, he guessed, very pretty, with a wealth of fair hair deepening into brown, dark blue eyes shaded with long dark lashes and a colour of health abloom in her cheeks.

“You have been in Egypt, uncle tells me.”

“In the Sudan,” Hillyard corrected.  “I have been shooting for eight months.”

“Shooting!”

Joan Whitworth’s eyes were turned on him in frank disappointment.  “The author of ’The Dark Tower’—­shooting!”

There was more than disappointment in her voice.  There was a hint of disdain.

Hillyard did not pursue the argument.

“I knew that I had seen you before.  I remember where now.  You were with Sir Chichester at the first performance of ‘The Dark Tower.’  I peeped out behind the curtain of my box and saw you.”

Joan’s face relaxed.

“Oh, yes, I was there.”

“But——­” Hillyard began, and caught himself up.  He had been on the point of saying that she had a very different aspect in the stalls of the Rubicon Theatre.  But he looked her up and down and held his peace.  Yet what he did substitute left him in no better case.