"Angry?" he said, stretching out his hand and laying it tenderly on her own, while the pain in his eyes softened into a melancholy as inscrutable as the pain. "Could I ever be angry with you, Enid? Poor little lonely motherless child! Heaven knows, if I could protect you from sorrow or pain henceforth, I would do so at the cost of my life!" He withdrew his hand and walked away somewhat abruptly, without once looking round. Enid remained where he had left her, pale with emotion, overpowered by a feeling that was neither joy nor fear, but which partook of both. CHAPTER XII. Hubert felt that he had been betrayed into displaying an excess of emotion very foreign to the character of the cynic and the worldling which he was desirous to assume. Circumstances, he told himself, had been too strong for him. Even at the price of not making a study for a novel of poor little Enid's personality--and how could he ever seriously have thought of such a thing?--he must not risk close intercourse with her. Her innocent allusions to the past, her guileless confidence in himself, wrung his heart with shame and dismay. When he left her, he wandered away to the other side of the sheet of water in front of the house, until he came to a small fir plantation on the side of the hill which rose from the water's edge. He had not been there for years, and yet he had not forgotten a single turning in the narrow pathway that ran deviously between the fir-tree shrubs; the memory of the little open glade in the centre of the tiny wood had never lost its terrible distinctness. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he could see every detail of the scene, every branch of the fir-trees against the darkening sky, every rise or depression in the mossy ground. The very scent of the woods gave him a sickening sensation; the crunch of a broken twig made him turn pale with the horror of a quick remembrance. For it was in the fir-wood that Sydney Vane had been found murdered--it was in the fir-wood that Hubert Lepel had first felt that his hand was red with his cousin's blood.