“Close the door!” she cried hoarsely—­“close the door!...  He has... followed me!"...

The disturbed novelist, as a man in a dream, turned, retraced his steps, and closed the outer door of the flat.  Then, rubbing his chin more vigorously than ever and only desisting from this exercise to fumble in his dishevelled hair, he walked back into the study, whose Athenean calm had thus mysteriously been violated.

Two minutes to midnight; the most respectable flat in respectable Westminster; a lonely and very abstracted novelist—­and a pale-faced, beautiful woman, enveloped in costly furs, sitting staring with fearful eyes straight before her.  This was such a scene as his sense of the proprieties and of the probabilities could never have permitted Henry Leroux to create.

His visitor kept moistening her dry lips and swallowing, emotionally.

Standing at a discreet distance from her:—­

“Madam,” began Leroux, nervously.

She waved her hand, enjoining him to silence, and at the same time intimating that she would explain herself directly speech became possible.  Whilst she sought to recover her composure, Leroux, gradually forcing himself out of the dreamlike state, studied her with a sort of anxious curiosity.

It now became apparent to him that his visitor was no more than twenty-five or twenty-six years of age, but illness or trouble, or both together, had seared and marred her beauty.  Amid the auburn masses of her hair, gleamed streaks, not of gray, but of purest white.  The low brow was faintly wrinkled, and the big—­unnaturally big—­eyes were purple shaded; whilst two heavy lines traced their way from the corner of the nostrils to the corner of the mouth—­of the drooping mouth with the bloodless lips.

Her pallor became more strange and interesting the longer he studied it; for, underlying the skin was a yellow tinge which he found inexplicable, but which he linked in his mind with the contracted pupils of her eyes, seeking vainly for a common cause.

He had a hazy impression that his visitor, beneath her furs, was most inadequately clothed; and seeking confirmation of this, his gaze strayed downward to where one little slippered foot peeped out from the civet furs.

Leroux suppressed a gasp.  He had caught a glimpse of a bare ankle!

He crossed to his writing-table, and seated himself, glancing sideways at this living mystery.  Suddenly she began, in a voice tremulous and scarcely audible:—­

“Mr. Leroux, at a great—­at a very great personal risk, I have come to-night.  What I have to ask of you—­to entreat of you, will... will"...

Two bare arms emerged from the fur, and she began clutching at her throat and bosom as though choking—­dying.

Leroux leapt up and would have run to her; but forcing a ghastly smile, she waved him away again.

“It is all right,” she muttered, swallowing noisily.  But frightful spasms of pain convulsed her, contorting her pale face.