The German waiter opened the door and a white-haired man walked in.  Directly she saw him Lady Ingleton lost her unusual feeling.  As she greeted him, and made her little apology for bothering him, and thanked him for coming out at night to see a stranger, she felt glad that she had obeyed her impulse and had been, for once, a victim to altruism.  When she looked at his eyes she knew that she would not mind saying to him all she wanted to say about Dion Leith.  They were eyes which shone with clarity; and they were something else—­they were totally incurious eyes.  Perhaps from perversity Lady Ingleton had always rebelled against giving to curious people the exact food they were in search of.

“He won’t be greedy to know,” she thought.  “And so I shan’t mind telling him.”

Unlike a woman, she came at once to the point.  Although she could be very evasive she could also be very direct.

“You know Mrs. Dion Leith,” she said.  “My friend Tippie Chetwinde, Mrs. Willie Chetwinde, told me she was living here.  She came here soon after the death of her child, I believe.”

“Yes, she did, and she has been here ever since.”

“Do you know Dion Leith, Mr. Robertson?” she asked, leaning forward in her chair by the fire, and fixing her large eyes, that looked like an Italian’s, upon him.

“No, I have never seen him.  I hoped to, but the tragedy of the child occurred so soon after his return from South Africa that I never had an opportunity.”

“Forgive me for correcting you,” she said, gently but very firmly.  “But it is not the tragedy of a child.  It’s the tragedy of a man.  I am going to talk very frankly to you.  I make no apology for doing so.  I am what is called”—­she smiled faintly—­“a woman of the world, and you, I think, are an unworldly man.  Because I am of the world, and you, in spirit”—­she looked at him almost deprecatingly—­“are not of it, I can say what I have come here to try to say.  I couldn’t say it to a man of the world, because I could never give a woman away to such a man.  Tell me though, first, if you don’t mind—­do you care for Mrs. Dion Leith?”

“Very much,” said Father Robertson, simply and warmly.

“Do you care for her enough to tell her the truth?”

“I never wish to tell her anything else.”

Suddenly Lady Ingleton’s face flushed, her dark eyes flashed and then filled with tears, and she said in a voice that shook with emotion: 

“Dion Leith killed a body by accident, the body of his little boy.  She is murdering a soul deliberately, the soul of her husband.”

She did not know at all why she was so suddenly and so violently moved.  She had not expected this abrupt access of feeling.  It had rushed upon her from she knew not where.  She was startled by it.

“I don’t know why I should care,” she commented, as if half ashamed of herself.

Then she added, with a touch of almost shy defiance: