Hillyard turned to a girl, pretty and, by a few years, younger than Stella Croyle.

“I have orders not to wake Mrs. Croyle until she rings,” said the maid.  Jenny Prask, she was called, and she spoke with just a touch of pleasant Sussex drawl.  “Mrs. Croyle has not been sleeping well, and she looked for a good night’s rest in country air.”

The maid was so healthful in her appearance, so reasonable in her argument, that Hillyard’s terrors, fostered by solitude, began to lose their vivid colours.

“I understand that,” he stammered.  “Yet, Jenny——­”

Jenny Prask smiled.

“You are Mr. Hillyard, I think?”

“Yes.”

“I have heard my mistress speak of you.”  Hillyard knew enough of maids to understand that “mistress” was an unusual word with them.  Here, it seemed, was a paragon of maids, who was quite content to be publicly Stella Croyle’s maid, whose gentility suffered no offence by the recognition of a mistress.

“If you wish, I will wake her.”

Jenny Prask went up the stairs, Hillyard at her heels.  She knocked upon the door.  No answer was returned.  She opened it and entered.

Stella Croyle was up and dressed.  She was sitting at a table by the window with some sheets of notepaper and some envelopes in front of her, and her back was towards Hillyard and the open door.  But she was dressed as she had been dressed the evening before when he had left her; the curtains in the room were drawn, and the electric lights on the writing-table and the walls were still burning.  The bed had not been slept in.

Stella Croyle rose and turned towards her visitors.  She tottered a little as she stood up, and her eyes were dazed.

“Why have you come here?” she asked faintly, and she fell rather than sat again in her chair.

Hillyard sprang forward and tore the curtains aside so that the sunlight poured into the room, and Stella opened and shut her eyes with a contraction of pain.

“I had so many letters to write,” she explained, “I thought that I would sit up and get through with them.”

Hillyard looked at the table.  There were great black dashes on the notepaper and lines, and here and there a scribbled picture of a face, and perhaps now and again half a word.  She had sat at that table all night and had not even begun a letter.  Hillyard’s heart was torn with pity as he looked from her white, tired face to the sheets of notepaper.  What misery and unhappiness did those broad, black dashes and idle lines express?

“You must have some breakfast,” he said.  “I’ll order it and have it ready for you downstairs by the time you are ready.  Then I’ll take you back to London.”

The blood suddenly mounted into her face.

“You will?” she cried wildly.  “In a reserved compartment, so that I may do nothing rash and foolish?  Are you going to be kind too?”