They remained silent staring at it till Mrs. Fyne whispered doubtfully "I

really think I must go over." Fyne didn't answer for a while (his is a

reflective mind, you know), and then as if Mrs. Fyne's whispers had an

occult power over that door it opened wide again and the white-bearded

man issued, astonishingly active in his movements, using his stick almost

like a leaping-pole to get down the steps; and hobbled away briskly along

the pavement. Naturally the Fynes were too far off to make out the

expression of his face. But it would not have helped them very much to a

guess at the conditions inside the house. The expression was humorously

puzzled--nothing more.

For, at the end of his lesson, seizing his trusty stick and coming out

with his habitual vivacity, he very nearly cannoned just outside the

drawing-room door into the back of Miss de Barral's governess. He

stopped himself in time and she turned round swiftly. It was

embarrassing; he apologised; but her face was not startled; it was not

aware of him; it wore a singular expression of resolution. A very

singular expression which, as it were, detained him for a moment. In

order to cover his embarrassment, he made some inane remark on the

weather, upon which, instead of returning another inane remark according

to the tacit rules of the game, she only gave him a smile of unfathomable

meaning. Nothing could have been more singular. The good-looking young

gentleman of questionable appearance took not the slightest notice of him

in the hall. No servant was to be seen. He let himself out pulling the

door to behind him with a crash as, in a manner, he was forced to do to

get it shut at all.

When the echo of it had died away the woman on the landing leaned over

the banister and called out bitterly to the man below "Don't you want to

come up and say good-bye." He had an impatient movement of the shoulders

and went on pacing to and fro as though he had not heard. But suddenly

he checked himself, stood still for a moment, then with a gloomy face and

without taking his hands out of his pockets ran smartly up the stairs.

Already facing the door she turned her head for a whispered taunt: "Come!

Confess you were dying to see her stupid little face once more,"--to

which he disdained to answer.

Flora de Barral, still seated before the table at which she had been

wording on her sketch, raised her head at the noise of the opening door.

The invading manner of their entrance gave her the sense of something she

had never seen before. She knew them well. She knew the woman better

than she knew her father. There had been between them an intimacy of

relation as great as it can possibly be without the final closeness of

affection. The delightful Charley walked in, with his eyes fixed on the

back of her governess whose raised veil hid her forehead like a brown

band above the black line of the eyebrows. The girl was astounded and

alarmed by the altogether unknown expression in the woman's face. The

stress of passion often discloses an aspect of the personality completely

ignored till then by its closest intimates. There was something like an

emanation of evil from her eyes and from the face of the other, who,

exactly behind her and overtopping her by half a head, kept his eyelids

lowered in a sinister fashion--which in the poor girl, reached, stirred,

set free that faculty of unreasoning explosive terror lying locked up at

the bottom of all human hearts and of the hearts of animals as well. With

suddenly enlarged pupils and a movement as instinctive almost as the

bounding of a startled fawn, she jumped up and found herself in the

middle of the big room, exclaiming at those amazing and familiar

strangers.




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