It happened, therefore, that it was in Howard Cardew’s opulent dressing-room that Howard first spoke to Willy Cameron of Akers’ death, pacing the floor as he did so.

“I haven’t told her, Cameron.”  He was anxious and puzzled.  “She’ll have to be told soon, of course.  I don’t know anything about women.  I don’t know how she’ll take it.”

“She has a great deal of courage.  It will be a shock, but not a grief.  But I have been thinking—­” Willy Cameron hesitated.  “She must not feel any remorse,” he went on.  “She must not feel that she contributed to it in any way.  If you can make that clear to her—­”

“Are you sure she did not?”

“It isn’t facts that matter now.  We can’t help those.  And no one can tell what actually led to his change of heart.  It is what she is to think the rest of her life.”

Howard nodded.

“I wish you would tell her,” he said.  “I’m a blundering fool when it comes to her.  I suppose I care too much.”

He caught rather an odd look in Willy Cameron’s face at that, and pondered over it later.

“I will tell her, if you wish.”

And Howard drew a deep breath of relief.  It was shortly after that he broached another matter, rather diffidently.

“I don’t know whether you realize it or not, Cameron,” he said, “but this thing to-day might have been a different story if it had not been for you.  And—­don’t think I’m putting this on a reward basis.  It’s nothing of the sort—­but I would like to feel that you were working with me.  I’d hate like thunder to have you working against me,” he added.

“I am only trained for one thing.”

“We use chemists in the mills.”

But the discussion ended there.  Both men knew that it would be taken up later, at some more opportune time, and in the meantime both had one thought, Lily.

So it happened that Lily heard the news of Louis Akers’ death from Willy Cameron.  She stood, straight and erect, and heard him through, watching him with eyes sunken by her night’s vigil and by the strain of the day.  But it seemed to her that he was speaking of some one she had known long ago, in some infinitely remote past.

“I am sorry,” she said, when he finished.  “I didn’t want him to die.  You know that, don’t you?  I never wished him—­Willy, I say I am sorry, but I don’t really feel anything.  It’s dreadful.”

Before he could catch her she had fallen to the floor, fainting for the first time in her healthy young life.

* * * * *

An hour later Mademoiselle went down to the library door.  She found Willy Cameron pacing the floor, a pipe clenched in his teeth, and a look of wild despair in his eyes.

Mademoiselle took a long breath.  She had changed her view-point somewhat since the spring.  After all, what mattered was happiness.  Wealth and worldly ambition were well enough, but they brought one, in the end, to the thing which waited for all in some quiet upstairs room, with the shades drawn and the heavy odors of hot-house flowers over everything.