The news of her husband’s illness had fallen like a knell on Annie’s ears; for in a moment she saw that the bright vision of pleasure and satisfied ambition which Aubrey’s words about a London engagement in the same theater with him had called up could not be indulged in, except at the sacrifice of an unmistakable duty. It was her husband who lay ill, neglected and solitary. For one moment she tried to stifle conscience by saying to herself that she did not know where he was; but then she felt ashamed of the flimsy excuse, for she could not doubt that he was at Garstone Grange. Aubrey had said that it was on Wednesday night that the accident had happened to him, and it was on Wednesday night that she herself had seen and even touched him in the streets of Beckham. She must go to him, and at once, before Aubrey could guess her secret, before she herself, in an unguarded moment, should let him know how much this separation would cost her. She dared not trust herself to think what a great part of the fact of his being engaged at the same theater had had in her joy at the prospect of playing again in London; it was a dangerous subject, and she shunned it instinctively. She tried to keep her thoughts fixed on this one simple idea--she must go to Garstone, nurse her husband through his illness, bear his brutal temper and thankless snubs as best she might, and then slip back quietly into her free stage life once more, taking her chance of getting a town engagement. So, on the morning after her talk with Aubrey, she got the manager to cancel the rest of her engagement, and, having packed her trunk the night before, she left for Beckham within an hour of his releasing her. She looked restlessly and eagerly from the windows of the cab as she drove to the station “to see if any of the company were about.” At last she caught sight of Aubrey Cooke going down a street, with his back to the cab, therefore so that he could not see her; and after that she looked out no more, but sat with burning cheeks and her eyes fixed on the front seat of the cab, all curiosity and interest gone out of her. She got to Beckham at three o’clock in the afternoon, and drove straight to the Grange, which she reached before the dark November day had closed. To her surprise, the man-servant who opened the door recognized her at once. To her questions he replied that Mr. Harold was being nursed by the housekeeper, that Lady Braithwaite and Mr. Stephen were abroad, Sir George was in town, Mr. Wilfred in Leicestershire, and Mr. William somewhere--he did not know where--“studying.”