She rang the bell calmly, but instead of dropping her hand, pressed the little bare patch of palm left open by the glove to her face, to see whether it was indeed her own cheek flaming so.

The door had been opened by some unseen agency, disclosing a passage and flight of stairs covered by a red carpet, at the foot of which lay an old, tangled, brown-white dog full of fleas and sorrow.  Unreasoning terror seized on Barbara; her body remained rigid, but her spirit began flying back across the Green Park, to the very hall of Valleys House.  Then she saw coming towards her a youngish woman in a blue apron, with mild, reddened eyes.

“Is this where Mr. Courtier lives?”

“Yes, miss.”  The teeth of the young woman were few in number and rather black; and Barbara could only stand there saying nothing, as if her body had been deserted between the sunlight and this dim red passage, which led to-what?

The woman spoke again: 

“I’m sorry if you was wanting him, miss, he’s just gone away.”

Barbara felt a movement in her heart, like the twang and quiver of an elastic band, suddenly relaxed.  She bent to stroke the head of the old dog, who was smelling her shoes.  The woman said: 

“And, of course, I can’t give you his address, because he’s gone to foreign parts.”

With a murmur, of whose sense she knew nothing, Barbara hurried out into the sunshine.  Was she glad?  Was she sorry?  At the corner of the street she turned and looked back; the two heads, of the woman and the dog, were there still, poked out through the doorway.

A horrible inclination to laugh seized her, followed by as horrible a desire to cry.

CHAPTER XXVI

By the river the West wind, whose murmuring had visited Courtier and Miltoun the night before, was bringing up the first sky of autumn.  Slow-creeping and fleecy grey, the clouds seemed trying to overpower a sun that shone but fitfully even thus early in the day.  While Audrey Noel was dressing sunbeams danced desperately on the white wall, like little lost souls with no to-morrow, or gnats that wheel and wheel in brief joy, leaving no footmarks on the air.  Through the chinks of a side window covered by a dark blind some smoky filaments of light were tethered to the back of her mirror.  Compounded of trembling grey spirals, so thick to the eye that her hand felt astonishment when it failed to grasp them, and so jealous as ghosts of the space they occupied, they brought a moment’s distraction to a heart not happy.  For how could she be happy, her lover away from her now thirty hours, without having overcome with his last kisses the feeling of disaster which had settled on her when he told her of his resolve.  Her eyes had seen deeper than his; her instinct had received a message from Fate.