She at once went down and received him. He looked fixedly into her face for a slight while, after they had seated themselves. He knew all that had happened, and he understood just how savage and calamitous must seem to her the blows from which she was now suffering. He read excitement and even despair in every line of her features, though he clearly perceived that both were held under a determined repression. 'She means not to let herself go one inch,' he decided. 'If she did, she would break down altogether. She has wound herself up to a certain pitch. She will keep just this way for hours yet. She will keep so--if nothing strange and unforeseen should happen.' A deep and vital pity pierced him while he watched her. He loved her, and his love made him unreasonably lenient. A sacred sadness invested her, for his eyes, in this the hour of her misfortune and overthrow. He forgot how blameworthy she had been, and could remember only that destiny would soon hurl in the dust the crown that she had worn with so much grace and grandeur. "Did you come to speak of my--of our trouble?" she said, her lip quivering for an instant and no more. "No," he replied. "But since _you_ speak of it, is all chance of recovery gone? May not matters right themselves somehow?" She shook her head in quick negative. "I think not. He has lost everything--or nearly that." She broke into a smile, which had for her companion only the brightness one might see in tears. "I suppose it seems to you like a punishment--a retribution." Her gaze dwelt on him with a mournful kind of pleasantry. It was like the spirit of Comedy slipping her gay mask a little down and showing beneath it a glimpse of pallor and fatigue. "But do not let us talk of that. You wanted to talk of something else. What was it? your sister's refusal, at the eleventh hour, to come to my lunch?" "Has she refused?" "She has a sick headache," returned Claire, with a bit of joyless laughter--the saddest he had ever heard leave her lips. "I don't doubt our disreputable downfall has given it to her. Don't make excuses for her; she is quite right to have her headache. It's a fastidious prerogative, you know. I shan't require a physician's certificate. I only hope that all the others will be cruel in just as civil a manner." The tragic bitterness of these words, though they were quietly enough uttered, stung Thurston to the quick. When a man loves as he loved, compassion waits the ready vassal of tenderness. He had a momentary feeling of hostility against an elusive, disembodied foe--against circumstance itself, so to speak, for having wrought discord in a life that was meant to hold nothing but melody.