Perhaps the most troubled moment of the night came an hour after he went to bed.

Then it was that a face bent over him for a minute, a fair face, with little lines contracting the ripe lips, which were redder than usual, with eyes full of a fevered brightness.  But how harmonious and sweetly ordered was the golden hair above!  Nothing was gone from its lustre, nothing robbed it of its splendour.  It lay upon her forehead like a crown.  In its richness it seemed a little too heavy for the tired face beneath, almost too imperial for so slight and delicate a figure.

Rudyard stirred in his sleep, murmuring as she leaned over him; and his head fell away from her hand as she stretched out her fingers with a sudden air of pity—­of hopelessness, as it might seem from her look.  His face restlessly turned to the wall—­a vexed, stormy, anxious face and head, scarred by the whip of that overlord more cruel and tyrannous than Time, the Miserable Mind.

She drew back with a little shudder.  “Poor Ruddy!” she said, as she had said that evening when Ian Stafford came to her after the estranging and scornful years, and she had watched Rudyard leave her—­to her fate and to her folly.

“Poor Ruddy!”

With a sudden frenzied motion of her hands she caught her breath, as though some pain had seized her.  Her eyes almost closed with the shame that reached out from her heart, as though to draw the veil of her eyelids over the murdered thing before her—­murdered hope, slaughtered peace:  the peace of that home they had watched burn slowly before their eyes in the years which the locust had eaten.

Which the locust had eaten—­yes, it was that.  More than once she had heard Rudyard tell of a day on the veld when the farmer surveyed his abundant fields with joy, with the gay sun flaunting it above; and suddenly there came a white cloud out of the west, which made a weird humming, a sinister sound.  It came with shining scales glistening in the light and settled on the land acre upon acre, morgen upon morgen; and when it rose again the fields, ready for the harvest, were like a desert—­the fields which the locust had eaten.  So had the years been, in which Fortune had poured gold and opportunity and unlimited choice into her lap.  She had used them all; but she had forgotten to look for the Single Secret, which, like a key, unlocks all doors in the House of Happiness.

“Poor Ruddy!” she said, but even as she said it for the second time a kind of anger seemed to seize her.

“Oh, you fool—­you fool!” she whispered, fiercely.  “What did you know of women!  Why didn’t you make me be good?  Why didn’t you master me—­the steel on the wrist—­the steel on the wrist!”

With a little burst of misery and futile rage she went from the room, her footsteps uneven, her head bent.  One of the open letters she carried dropped from her hand onto the floor of the hall outside.  She did not notice it.  But as she passed inside her door a shadowy figure at the end of the hall watched her, saw the letter drop, and moved stealthily forward towards it.  It was Krool.