Where was Rudyard?  Why had he not come to her, Why had he not eaten the breakfast which still lay untouched on the table of his study?  Where was Rudyard?

Ian’s eyes looked straight into hers as she came down the staircase, and there was that in them which paralyzed her.  But she made an effort to ignore the apprehension which filled her soul.

“Good-morning.  Am I so very late?” she said, gaily, to him, though there was a hollow note in her voice.

“You are just in time,” he answered in an even tone which told nothing.

“Dear me, what a gloomy face!  What has happened?  What is it?  There seems to be a Cassandra atmosphere about the place—­and so early in the day, too.”

“It is full noon—­and past,” he said, with acute meaning, as her daintily shod feet met the floor of the hallway and glided towards him.  How often he had admired that pretty flitting of her feet!

As he looked at her he was conscious, with a new force, of the wonder of that hair on a little head as queenly as ever was given to the modern world.  And her face, albeit pale, and with a strange tremulousness in it now, was like that of some fairy dame painted by Greuze.  All last night’s agony was gone from the rare blue eyes, whose lashes drooped so ravishingly betimes, though that droop was not there as she looked at Ian now.

She beat a foot nervously on the floor.  “What is it—­why this Euripidean air in my simple home?  There’s something wrong, I see.  What is it?  Come, what is it, Ian?”

Hesitatingly she laid a hand upon his arm, but there was no loving-kindness in his look.  The arms which yesterday—­only yesterday—­had clasped her passionately and hungrily to his breast now hung inert at his side.  His eyes were strange and hard.

“Will you come in here,” he said, in an arid voice, and held wide the door of the room where he and Rudyard had settled the first chapter of the future and closed the book of the past.

She entered with hesitating step.  Then he shut the door with an accentuated softness, and came to the table where he had sat with Rudyard.  Mechanically she took the seat which Rudyard had occupied, and looked at him across the table with a dread conviction stealing over her face, robbing it of every vestige of its heavenly colour, giving her eyes a staring and solicitous look.

“Well, what is it?  Can’t you speak and have it over?” she asked, with desperate impatience.

“Fellowes’ letter to you—­Rudyard found it,” he said, abruptly.

She fell back as though she had been struck, then recovered herself.  “You read it?” she gasped.

“Rudyard made me read it.  I came in when he was just about to kill Fellowes.”

She gave a short, sharp cry, which with a spasm of determination her fingers stopped.

“Kill him—­why?” she asked in a weak voice, looking down at her trembling hands which lay clasped on the table before her.