“This reached me this morning.”

Stella Croyle studied the paper with her heart in her mouth.  But the letters would not be still.

“Oh, what does it mean?” she cried.

“It offers me service abroad.”

Stella’s face flushed and turned white.  She bent her head over the cablegram.

“At Cairo,” she said, with a little gasp of relief.  After all Cairo was not so far.  A week, and one was at Cairo.

“Further south, in the Sudan—­Heaven knows where!”

“Too far then?” she suggested.  “Too far.”

“For you?  Yes!  Too far,” Luttrell replied.

Stella lifted a tragic face towards him; and though he winced he met her eyes.

“But you are not going!  You can’t go!”

Luttrell handed to her the second paper.

“You never wrote this,” she said very quickly.

“Yet it is what I would have written.”

Stella Croyle shot one swift glance at Sir Charles Hardiman.  She had recognised his handwriting.  Hardiman was in Luttrell’s cabin while the rest of the party waited on the deck and the launch throbbed at the gangway.  If a woman’s glance had power, he would have been stricken that instant.  But she wasted no more than a glance upon the worldly-wiseman at the head of their table.  She turned again to the first telegram.

“This is an answer, this cablegram from Cairo?”

“Yes.”

“To a cable of yours?”

“Sent three days ago.”

The answers she received were clear, unhesitating.  It was a voice from a rock speaking!  So utterly mistaken was she; and so completely Luttrell bent every nerve to the service of shortening the hour of misery.  The appalling moment was then actually upon her.  She had foreseen it—­so she thought.  But it caught her nevertheless unprepared as death catches a sinner on his bed.

She stared at the telegrams—­not reading them.  His arguments and prefaces—­the Olympic Games, Discipline and the rest of it—­what she had caught of them, she blew away as so much froth.  She dived to the personal reason.

“You are tired of me.”

“No,” Luttrell answered hotly.  “That’s not true—­not even a half-truth.  If I were tired of you, it would all be so easy, so brutally easy.”

“But you are!” Her voice rose shrill in its violence.  “You know you are but you are too much of a coward to say so—­oh, like all men!” and as Luttrell turned to her a face startled by her outcry and uttered a remonstrant “Hush!”, she continued bitterly, “What do I care if they all hear?  I am impossible!  You know that, don’t you?  I am quite impossible!  I have gone my own way.  I am one of the people you hate—­one of the Undisciplined.”

Stella Croyle hardly knew in her passion what she was saying, and Luttrell could only wait in silence for the storm to pass.  It passed with a quickness which caught him at loss; so quickly she swept from mood to mood.