He laughed, shrugging his shoulders and throwing out his hands with a graceful foreign movement. “I was rather a culprit, you see,” he said. “I only spent those few hours in Alexandria, and I never gave a thought to your commission. And I felt such a brute about it that I wasn’t up to confessing!” It was the truth and the whole truth, and it conveyed itself as such. Mrs. Romayne knelt there for a moment more, looking into his eyes, her own wide and strained; and then she rose heavily and slowly to her feet. There was a pause. The silence was broken by Julian, evidently with a view to changing a subject on which he could hardly be said to show to conspicuous advantage. “You’re going to write to Falconer, I suppose? You wouldn’t like to do it to-night, dear, would you? He would get the letter in better time if it was posted the first thing. You could do it at my table there!” Mrs. Romayne did not speak. Julian could not see her face. “Yes!” she said at last, and her voice sounded rather hollow and far away, “I will do it to-night if you like.” She bent down and kissed him. “Good night!” she said. “Won’t you write here?” said Julian in some surprise. “No, I’ll go upstairs!” she answered, and went out of the room. She went upstairs, moving slowly and heavily, straight to her dainty little writing-table, and sat down, drawing out a sheet of paper. She wrote the conventional words of address to Dennis Falconer, and then she stopped suddenly and lifted her face. It was ghastly. The eyes, sunken and dim, seemed to be confronting the very irony of fate. CHAPTER XIV “The jolliest week I’ve ever had in my life!” “I wonder how often you’ve said that before?” August had come and gone, the greater part of September had followed in its wake, and a ruddy September sun was making the end of the summer glorious. In the large garden of a large country house in Norfolk, everything seen in its wonderful radiance seemed to be even overcharged with colour, if such a thing is possible with nature; it was as though all the beauty of the summer had been intensified and arrested in its maturity into one final glow. The rich green of the smooth lawns, the colours of the autumnal flowers, the tints of the foliage, the very atmosphere, seemed all alike to be pausing for the moment at the most perfect point of radiance. But nature never pauses; and that this was indeed the final glow, the end of her summer beauty, was revealed here and there by little significant touches, or written across earth and sky in broader letters. The birds were gone or going. Even as Julian Romayne spoke a flight of swallows overhead was wheeling and darting hither and thither in preparation for an imminent departure; the very glory of the trees meant decay, and in spite of all the efforts of indefatigable gardeners, dead leaves strewed the trim lawns and gravel paths.