She sinks upon a chair as she speaks; and, resting her elbow upon the table, passes her pocket-handkerchief once or twice over her face, wiping away the cold drops of anguish that, despite the morning's radiant warmth, are gathering upon it. He waits beside her, in a black suspense, pushing away from him the fear that he refuses to formulate. 'There!' she says, after a year's interval, which the clock falsely calls sixty seconds; 'I--I--beg your pardon for keeping you waiting.' She has banished, as far as she can, all signs of emotion, and begins in a level low voice. 'Prue got better almost immediately after you went away last night--was it really only last night?' with a bewildered look; then, immediately recovering herself, 'so decidedly better, that I thought I might safely leave her.' She pauses. 'I--I--thought I--I--would follow you.' Another pause. It is evidently killing work to get on at all. Angry as he is with her, clearly as he now sees what is coming, he cannot help a compassionate wish to help her, and make it easier for her. 'I--did not know which way you had gone,' she resumes, after another battle with herself; 'no one had seen you. But I thought--I guessed--I fancied that it might have been to the walled garden, because--because we had--had--said good-bye there last year.' Her voice wavers so distressingly that he thinks she is about to lose all control over it; but no!--in a moment she has recovered her self-mastery, and taken up her thread again. 'As I drew near the garden, I saw that the gate was a little open, so I knew that I had guessed right. I--looked--in; I--saw--oh!' with a burst of indignant agony, 'are you going to make me tell you what I saw?' 'Yes,' he says breathlessly, 'tell me!--what?' A hope, faint, and yet tenacious, lingers in his mind that it may have been any one moment of his last night's interview except that of the supreme embrace which she had witnessed. He has not long to wait before this last prop is knocked from under him. 'I--I--saw--you holding--a woman in your arms, and, a moment after, she ran past me--and I saw--who she was!' The answer he has insisted upon reaches him in a broken whisper; and her strained eyes are fastened upon him, as if, in the teeth of a certainty as absolute as that of her own identity, she were nourishing the hopeless hope of his uttering some impossible, yet convincing, denial. But he attempts none such. He stands before her silent, with his arms still folded and the tide of a shoreless despair washing over his heart. Betty has put the crowning touch to her work. 'It is true then?' Peggy asks, in a voice of such bitter suffering as if she were realising it for the first time; as if she had not already known it for twelve endless hours. 'What is the use of denying it?' he replies blankly; 'you say that you saw her!'