“Shall I tell you what it is I lack?” he answered suddenly.  “Incentive.  I think my will has suddenly grown flabby, the ego in me unresponsive.  You know the moods in which one asks oneself whether it is worth while, whether anything is worth while.  Well, I am there at the crossroads.  I think I feel more inclined to look for a seat than to go on.”

“The strongest of us need to rest sometimes,” she agreed quietly.

He relapsed into a silence so apparently deliberate that she accepted it as a respite for herself also.  From the greater seclusion of her shadowy seat, she found herself presently able to watch him unnoticed,—­the brooding melancholy of his face, the nervous, unsatisfied mouth, the discontent of his sombre brows.  Then, even as she watched, the change in his expression startled her.  His eyes were fixed upon the narrow ribbon of road which twisted around the other side of the house and led over the bleaker moors, seawards.  The look puzzled her, gave her an uncomfortable feeling.  Its note of appreciation seemed to her inexplicable.  With a quaint, electrical sympathy, he caught the unspoken question in her eyes and translated it.

“You are beginning to doubt me,” he said.  “You are wondering if the shadow I carry with me is not something more than the mere depression of a man who has failed.”

“You have not failed,” she declared, “and I never doubt you, but there was something in your face just then which was strange, something alien to our talk.  It was as though you saw something ominous in the distance.”

“It is true,” he admitted.  “In the distance I can see the car I ordered to come and fetch me.  There is a passenger—­a man in the tonneau.  I am wondering who he is.”

“Some one to whom your man has given a lift, perhaps,” she suggested.

He shook his head.

“I have another feeling—­perhaps I should say an apprehension.  It is some one who brings news.”

“Political or—­domestic?”

“Neither,” he answered.  “I thought that Fate had dealt me out most of her evil tricks when I came down here, a political outcast.  She had another one up her sleeve, however.  Do you read your morning papers?”

“Every day,” she confessed.  “Is it a weakness?”

“Not at all.”

“You read of the disappearance of the Honourable Anthony Palliser?”

“Of course,” she answered.  “Besides, you told me about it, did you not, yesterday afternoon?  I know one of his sisters quite well, and I was looking forward to seeing something of him down here.”

“I was obliged to dismiss him at a moment’s notice,” Tallente went on.  “He betrayed his trust and he has disappeared.  That very imposing police inspector who broke up our tete-a-tete yesterday afternoon and I fear shortened your visit came on his account.  He was the spokesman for a superior authority in London.  They have come to the conclusion that I could, if I chose, throw some light upon his disappearance.”