“They will be sent after you to your chambers.  Give me the keys to the desk in the secretary’s room.”

“I’ll go myself, and—­”

“You will leave this house at once, and everything will be sent after you—­everything.  Have no fear.  I will send them myself, and your letters and private papers will not be read....  You feel you can rely on me for that—­eh?”

“Yes . . .  I’ll go now . . . abroad . . . where?”

“Where you please outside the United Kingdom.”

Fellowes passed heavily out through the other room, where his letter had been read by Stafford, where his fate had been decided.  He put on his overcoat nervously and went to the outer door.

Stafford came up to him again.  “You understand, there must be no attempt to communicate here....  You will observe this?”

Fellowes nodded.  “Yes, I will....  Good-night,” he added, absently.

“Good-day,” answered Stafford, mechanically.

The outer door shut, and Stafford turned again to the little room where so much had happened which must change so many lives, bring so many tears, divert so many streams of life.

How still the house seemed now!  It had lost all its charm and homelikeness.  He felt stifled.  Yet there was the warm sun streaming through the doorway of the music-room, making the beaded curtains shine like gold.

As he stood in the doorway of the little morning-room, looking in with bitter reflection and dreading beyond words what now must come—­his meeting with Jasmine, the story he must tell her, and the exposure of a truth so naked that his nature revolted from it, he heard a footstep behind him.  It was Krool.

Stafford looked at the saturnine face and wondered how much he knew; but there was no glimmer of revelation in Krool’s impassive look.  The eyes were always painful in their deep animal-like glow, and they seemed more than usually intense this morning; that was all.

“Will you present my compliments to Mrs. Byng, and say—­”

Krool, with a gesture, stopped him.

“Mrs. Byng is come now,” he said, making a gesture towards the staircase.  Then he stole away towards the servants’ quarters of the house.  His work had been well done, of its kind, and he could now await consequences.

Stafford turned to the staircase and saw—­in blue, in the old sentimental blue—­Jasmine slowly descending, a strange look of apprehension in her face.

Immediately after calling out for Rudyard a little while before, she had discovered the loss of Adrian Fellowes’ letter.  Hours before this she had read and re-read Ian’s letter, that document of pain and purpose, of tragical, inglorious, fatal purpose.  She was suddenly conscious of an air of impending catastrophe about her now.  Or was it that the catastrophe had come?  She had not asked for Adrian Fellowes’ letter, for if any servant had found it, and had not returned it, it was useless asking; and if Rudyard had found it—­if Rudyard had found it . . . !