She broke into a peal of shrill and bitter laughter.  Then her head went down upon her hands, and she gave herself up to such a passion of sobbing and tears as was quite beyond all Hillyard’s experience.  Yet he would rather hear those sobs and see her bowed shoulders shaking under the violence of them than listen again to the dreadful laughter which had gone before.  He had not the knowledge which could enable him to understand her sudden outburst, nor did he acquire that knowledge until long afterwards.  But he understood that quite unwittingly he had touched some painful chord in that wayward nature.

“I am going to take you back in my motor-car,” he said.  “I’ll be downstairs with the breakfast ready.”

She had probably eaten nothing, he reckoned, since teatime the day before.  Food was the steadying thing she needed now.  He went to the door which Jenny Prask held open for him.

“Don’t leave her!” he breathed in a whisper.

Jenny Prask smiled.

“Not me, sir,” she said fervently.

Hillyard remembered with comfort some words which she had spoken in appreciation of the loving devotion of her maid.

“In three-quarters of an hour,” said Jenny; and later on that morning, with a great fear removed from his heart, Hillyard drove Stella Croyle back to London.

CHAPTER XII

IN BARCELONA

It was nine o’clock on a night of late August.

The restaurant of the Maison Doree in the Plaza Cataluna at Barcelona looks across the brilliantly-lighted square from the south side.  On the pavement in front of it and of its neighbour, the Cafe Continental, the vendors of lottery tickets were bawling the lucky numbers they had for sale.  Even in this wide space the air was close and stale.  Within, a few people left over in the town had strayed in to dine at tables placed against the walls under flamboyant decorations in the style of Fragonard.  At a table Hillyard was sitting alone over his coffee.  Across the room one of the panels represented a gleaming marble terrace overlooking a country-side bathed in orange light; and on the terrace stood a sedan chair with drawn curtains, and behind the chair stood a saddled white horse.  Hillyard had dined more than once during the last few months at the Maison Doree; and the problem of that picture had always baffled him.  A lovers’ tryst!  But where were the lovers?  In some inner room shaded from the outrage of that orange light which never was on sea or land?  Or in the sedan chair?  Or were their faces to be discovered, as in the puzzle pictures, in the dappling of the horse’s flanks, or the convolutions of the pillars which supported the terrace roof, or the gilded ornamentations of the chair itself?  Hillyard was speculating for the twentieth time on these important matters with a vague hope that one day the door of the sedan chair would open, when another door opened—­the door of the restaurant.  A sharp-visaged man with a bald forehead, a clerk, one would say, or a commercial traveller, looked round the room and went forward to Hillyard’s table.  He went quite openly.