There was a brief but intense silence. Anna felt that her words had become charged with a fuller and more subtle meaning than any which she had intended to impart. "The truth!" It was a moment of awkwardness between the two sisters--a moment, too, charged with its own psychological interest, for there were secrets between them which for many months had made their intercourse a constrained and difficult thing. It was Annabel who spoke. "How crude you are, Anna!" she exclaimed with a little sigh. "Sir John is not at all that sort. He is the kind of man who would much prefer a little dust in his eyes. But heavens, I must pack!" She sprang to her feet and disappeared in the room beyond, from which she emerged a few minutes later with flushed cheeks and dishevelled hair. "It is positively no use, Anna," she declared, appealingly. "You must pack for me. I am sorry, but you have spoilt me. I can't do it even decently myself, and I dare not run the risk of ruining all my clothes." Anna laughed, gave in and with deft fingers created order out of chaos. Soon the trunk, portmanteau and hat box were ready. Then she took her sister's hand. "Annabel," she said, "I have never asked you for your confidence. We have lived under the same roof, but our ways seem to have lain wide apart. There are many things which I do not understand. Have you anything to tell me before you go?" Annabel laughed lightly. "My dear Anna! As though I should think of depressing you with my long list of misdeeds." "You have nothing to tell me?" "Nothing!" So Annabel departed with the slightest of farewells, wearing a thick travelling veil, and sitting far back in the corner of a closed carriage. Anna watched her from the windows, watched the carriage jolt away along the cobbled street and disappear. Then she stepped back into the empty room and stood for a moment looking down upon the scattered fragments of her last canvas. "It is a night of endings," she murmured to herself. "Perhaps for me," she added, with a sudden wistful look out of the bare high window, "a night of beginnings." _Chapter III_ ANNA? OR ANNABEL? Sir John was wholly unable to understand the laugh and semi-ironical cheer which greeted his entrance to the smoking-room of the English Club on the following evening. He stood upon the threshold, dangling his eye-glasses in his fingers, stolid, imperturbable, mildly interrogative. He wanted to know what the joke against him was--if any. "May I enquire," he asked smoothly, "in what way my appearance contributes to your amusement? If there is a joke I should like to share it." A fair-haired young Englishman looked up from the depths of his easy chair.