The door closed with a bang. How final it sounded! Almost as if Lady Wereminster were going out of her life, Evelyn thought. She put her hands to her head. Momentarily she was overpowered by the strange, sudden faintness which had come upon her so often lately. It passed, and she went back to the sitting-room, waiting with a set purpose. Sooner or later he would come. She looked for no merely human message. Between two hearts that beat absolutely as one there is no need for such communications in moments of great crisis. The one calls to the other, and the other obeys. At about eleven o’clock, the echo of boys’ voices calling the news rang through the open windows. Evelyn, still strangely idle, listened unmoved. She heard front doors being hurriedly opened, the shuffling of many feet up and down the kitchen steps; now and again voices from bedroom windows calling to the men below to wait for a moment until some hastily-awakened servant had time to get down and unlatch the door. Even in West Kensington such news had its interest. Evelyn pictured the thousand and one faces which, in London, were at that moment bending over "late specials," reading the lines which crushed a man’s career, temporarily at least, and broke his heart. The noise lulled. With ears extraordinarily quickened, Evelyn had heard the sound die away in the direction of Hammersmith and Fulham. The words echoed in her brain, like a discordant piece of music, recurring again and again— "RESIGNATION OF THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS!" "MR. FARQUHARSON’S RESIGNATION." Then new sounds came to distract her; the bustle of feet as the last Tubes disgorged late occupants returning from the theatre; the whir of an occasional taxi-cab; the hurrying wheels of hansoms; the almost inevitable discussion as to fares. Silence again. Then a new chorus of sounds—altered in character. This was the hour when belated clients were turned out from public-houses. They were uncertain, stumbling footsteps that passed now, confused voices, readily roused to mirth or anger. She heard a jumble of conflicting notes, annoyance, irritation, cajolery, laughter, broken at last by a policeman’s voice and a sharp order to move on. Then silence again. Nothing, now, but the bark and growl and eventual whimper of a stray fox-terrier shut out from the house opposite, and the never-ending wailing of cats, which sounds so exactly like the cry of a frightened child.