Looking, he saw her face was colorless: Steppe was alarmed. He wanted her badly. She had the appeal which other women lacked, qualities which he himself lacked. And he had frightened her. Perhaps she would break off everything. He expected to see the ring torn from her trembling hand and thrown on the floor at his feet. Instead of that: "I am very sorry, Mr. Steppe--foolish of me. I've had rather a trying day." She was breathless, as though she had been running at a great pace. "Of course, Beryl, I understand. I'm too rough with you, huh? Why, it is I who should be sorry, and I am. Good friends, huh?" He held out his hand, and shivering, she put her cold palm in his. "Doctor coming back soon? That's fine. You haven't sent him on any newspapers, huh? No, he could get them there." Other commonplaces, and he left her to work back to the cause of her fright. With reason again enthroned (this was somewhere near four o'clock in the morning) she could find no other reason than the obvious one. She was afraid of Steppe as a man. Not because he was a man, but because he was the kind of man that he was. He was a better man than Ronnie, she argued. He had principles of sorts. Ronnie had none. Perhaps she would get used to him: up to that moment it did not occur to her to break her engagement, and curiously enough, she never thought of her father. Steppe was sure in his mind that he held her through Dr. Merville. That was not true. Neither sense of honor nor filial duty bound her to her promise, nor was marriage an expiation. She must wear away her life in some companionship. After, was Ambrose Sault, in what shape she did not know or consider. She never thought of him as an angel. VII Sometimes the brain plays a trick upon you. In the midst of your everyday life you have a vivid yet elusive recollection of a past which is strange to you. You see yourself in circumstances and in a setting wholly unfamiliar. Like a flash it comes and goes; as swiftly as the shutter of a camera falls. Flick! It is gone and you can recall no incident upon which you can reconstruct the vision of the time-fraction. Beryl saw herself as she had been before she came upon a shabby gray-haired man studying the wallpaper in the hall of Dr. Merville's house. Yet she could never fix an impression. If the change of her outlook had been gradual, she might have traced back step by step. But it had been violent: catastrophic. And this bewildering truth appeared: that there had been no change so far as Ronnie was concerned. He had not altered in any degree her aspect of life. It worried her that it should be so. But there it was. She had a wire from her father the next morning to say that he was returning at once. Dr. Merville had seen certain comments in the newspaper and was taking the next train to Paris.