He had answered “What?” before he realized that this question was nothing more than a very vivid recollection. But even when he had assured himself that it was only a very vivid recollection, he lay still and discovered that his heart was beating very quickly. And so afraid was he that the motion of stretching out his arm would bring again the voice to his ears, that he lay still, his hand stretched along the counterpane. And suddenly he got up. He opened one white-painted cupboard, then the other. Finally, he went to the door of the room and peered out. His man, expressionless, carrying over his arm a pair of trousers, and in one hand a white letter crossed with blue, was slowly ascending the staircase at the end of the corridor. “You didn’t ask me a question,” Dudley Leicester said, “about two minutes ago?” Saunders said: “No, sir, I was answering the door to the postman. This, sir.” And he held out the registered letter. It was as if Dudley Leicester recoiled from it. It bore Pauline’s handwriting, a large, round, negligent scrawl. “Did he ask our number?” Dudley inquired eagerly; and Saunders, with as much of surprise as could come into his impassive face, answered: “Why, no, sir; he’s the regular man.” “Our telephone number, I mean,” Dudley Leicester said. Saunders was by this time in the room, passing through it to the door of the bath-cabinet. “As a matter of fact, sir,” he said, “the only thing he asked was whether Mrs. Leicester’s mother was any better.” “It’s very odd,” Dudley Leicester answered. And with Saunders splashing the water in the white bath-cabinet, with a touch of sun lighting up the two white rooms--in the midst of these homely and familiar sounds and reflections, fear suddenly seized Dudley Leicester. His wife’s letter frightened him; when there fell from it a bracelet, he started as he had never in his life started at a stumble of his horse. He imagined that it was a sort of symbol, a sending back of his gifts. And even when he had read her large, sparse words, and discovered that the curb chain of the bracelet was broken, and Pauline desired him to take it to the jeweller’s to be repaired--even then the momentary relief gave way to a host of other fears. For Dudley Leicester had entered into a world of dread. II HE appeared to have become friendless and utterly solitary. Even his man Saunders, to whom he had been attached as he had been attached to his comfortable furniture and his comfortable boots, seemed to him now to be grown reserved, frigid, disapproving. He imagined that Saunders had a threatening aspect. Fear suddenly possessed his heart when he perceived, seated in the breakfast-room, well forward in a deep saddle-bag chair, with Peter the dachshund between his speckless boots, Robert Grimshaw. “What have you come for?” Leicester asked; “what’s it about?” Robert Grimshaw raised his dark, seal-like eyes, and Leicester seemed to read in them reproof, judgment, condemnation.