She leaned back with half-closed eyes.  There was nothing new about their environment—­the clusters of roses, the perfume of the lilies in the rock garden, the even sweeter fragrance of the trim border of mignonette.  Away in the distance, the night was made momentarily ugly by the sound of a gramophone on a passing launch, yet this discordant note seemed only to bring the perfection of present things closer.  Back across the velvety lawn, through the feathery strips of foliage, the lights of The Sanctuary, shaded and subdued, were dimly visible.  The dining-table under the cedar-tree had already been cleared.  Hedges, newly arrived from town to play the major domo, was putting the finishing touches to a little array of cool drinks.  And beyond, dimly seen but always there, the wall.  She turned to him suddenly.

“You build a wall around your life,” she said, “like the wall which encircles your mystery house.  Last night I thought that I could see a little way over the top.  To-night you are different.”

“If I am different,” he answered quietly, “it is because, for the first time for many years, I have found myself wondering whether the life I had planned for myself, the things which I had planned should make life for me, are the best.  I have had doubts—­perhaps I might say regrets.”

“I should like to go to South America,” Lady Cynthia declared softly.

He finished the cigarette which he was smoking and deliberately threw away the stump.  Then he turned and looked at her.  His face seemed harder than ever, clean-cut, the face of a man able to defy Fate, but she saw something in his eyes which she had never seen before.

“Dear child,” he said, “if I could roll back the years, if from all my deeds of sin, as the world knows sin, I could cancel one, there is nothing in the world would make me happier than to ask you to come with me as my cherished companion to just whatever part of the world you cared for.  But I have been playing pitch and toss with fortune all my life, since the great trouble came which changed me so much.  Even at this moment, the coin is in the air which may decide my fate.”

“You mean?” she ventured.

“I mean,” he continued, “that after the event of which we spoke last night, nothing in life has been more than an incident, and I have striven to find distraction by means which none of you—­not even you, Lady Cynthia, with all your breadth of outlook and all your craving after new things—­would justify.”

“Nothing that you may have done troubles me in the least,” she assured him.  “I do wish that you could put it all out of your mind and let me help you to make a fresh start.”

“I may put the thing itself out of my mind,” he answered sadly, “but the consequences remain.”

“There is a consequence which threatens?” she asked.

He was silent for a moment.  When he spoke again, he had recovered all his courage.