Ray smiled, but he did not speak another word to me all the breakfast-time.  Once I made a remark to him, and his reply was curt, almost rude.  I left the room a few minutes afterwards, and came face to face in the hall with Lady Angela.

“I am glad, Mr. Ducaine,” she remarked, “that your early morning labours have given you an appetite.  You have been in to breakfast, have you not?”

“Your father was good enough to insist upon it,” I answered.

“You have seen him already this morning, then?”

“For a few minutes only,” I explained.  “I went up to his room.”

“I trust so far that everything is going on satisfactorily?” she inquired, raising her eyes to mine.

I did not answer her at once.  I was engaged in marvelling at the wonderful pallor of her cheeks.

“So far as I am concerned, I think so,” I said.  “Forgive me, Lady Angela,” I added, “but I think that you must have walked too far this morning.  You are very pale.”

“I am tired,” she admitted.

There was a lounge close at hand.  She moved slowly towards it, and sat down.  There was no spoken invitation, but I understood that I was permitted to remain with her.

“Do you know,” she said, looking round to make sure that we were alone, “I dread these meetings of the Council.  I have always the feeling that something terrible will happen.  I knew Lord Ronald very well, and his mother was one of my dearest friends.  I am sure that he was perfectly innocent.  And to-day he is in a madhouse.  They say that he will never recover.”

I did not wish to speak about these things, even with Lady Angela.  I tried to lead the conversation into other channels, but she absolutely ignored my attempt.

“There is something about it all so grimly mysterious,” she said.  “It seems almost as though there must be a traitor, if not in the Council itself, in some special and privileged position.”

She looked up at me as though asking for confirmation of her views.  I shook my head.

“Lady Angela,” I said, “would you mind if I abstained from expressing any opinion at all?  It is a subject which I feel it is scarcely right for me to discuss.”

She looked at me with wide-open eyes, a dash of insolence mingled with her surprise.  I do not know what she was about to say, for at that moment the young man with the sombre shooting suit and closely cropped hair paused for a moment on his way out of the breakfast-room.  He glanced at me, and I received a brief impression of an unwholesome-looking person with protuberant eyeballs, thin lashes, and supercilious mouth.

“I trust that the day’s entertainment will include something more than a glimpse of Lady Angela,” he said, with a low bow.

She raised her eyes.  It seemed to me, who was watching her closely, that she shrank a little back in her seat.  I was sure that she shared my instinctive dislike of the man.