Margaret, freeing her arm from her visitor’s hold, drew back a step; but Lady Caroline instantly rejoined her.

“Of course, I can see that if it had been, you might have been annoyed:  I dare say I put the case stupidly—­but I’m so bewildered by this new development—­by his using you all this time as a pretext—­that I really don’t know where to turn for light on the mystery—­”

She had Margaret in her imperious grasp again, but the latter broke from her with a more resolute gesture.

“I’m afraid I have no light to give you,” she began; but once more Lady Caroline caught her up.

“Oh, but do please understand me!  I condemn Guy most strongly for using your name—­when we all know you’d been so amazingly kind to him!  I haven’t a word to say in his defence—­but of course the important thing now is:  who is the woman, since you’re not?”

The question rang out loudly, as if all the pale puritan corners of the room flung it back with a shudder at the speaker.  In the silence that ensued Margaret felt the blood ebbing back to her heart; then she said, in a distinct and level voice:  “I know nothing of the history of Mr. Dawnish.”

Lady Caroline gave a stare and a gasp.  Her distracted hand groped for her boa and she began to wind it mechanically about her long neck.

“It would really be an enormous help to us—­and to poor Gwendolen Matcher,” she persisted pleadingly.  “And you’d be doing Guy himself a good turn.”

Margaret remained silent and motionless while her visitor drew on one of the worn gloves she had pulled off to adjust her veil.  Lady Caroline gave the veil a final twitch.

“I’ve come a tremendously long way,” she said, “and, since it isn’t you, I can’t think why you won’t help me. . . .”

When the door had closed on her visitor Margaret Ransom went slowly up the stairs to her room.  As she dragged her feet from one step to another, she remembered how she had sprung up the same steep flight after that visit of Guy Dawnish’s when she had looked in the glass and seen on her face the blush of youth.

When she reached her room she bolted the door as she had done that day, and again looked at herself in the narrow mirror above her dressing-table.  It was just a year since then—­the elms were budding again, the willows hanging their green veil above the bench by the river.  But there was no trace of youth left in her face—­she saw it now as others had doubtless always seen it.  If it seemed as it did to Lady Caroline Duckett, what look must it have worn to the fresh gaze of young Guy Dawnish?

A pretext—­she had been a pretext.  He had used her name to screen some one else—­or perhaps merely to escape from a situation of which he was weary.  She did not care to conjecture what his motive had been—­everything connected with him had grown so remote and alien.  She felt no anger—­only an unspeakable sadness, a sadness which she knew would never be appeased.