Peter found, next morning, Miss Monogue sitting by her window. She gave him at once the impression of something kept alive by a will-power so determined that Death himself could only stand aside and wait until it might waver. She was so thin that sitting there in the clear white colours of the sky beyond her window she seemed like fine silk, something that, at an instant's breath, would be swept like a shadow, into the air. She wore something loose and white and over her shoulders there was a grey shawl. Her grey hair was as untidy as of old, escaping from the order that it had been intended to keep and falling over her beautiful eyes, so that continually she moved her hand--so thin and white with its deep purple veins--to push it back. In this still white figure the eyes burnt with an amazing fire. What eyes they were! One seemed, in the old days, to have denied them their proper splendour, but now in this swiftly fading body they had gathered more life and vigour, showing the soul that triumphed over so slender a mortality. She seemed to Peter, as he came into the room, to stand for so much more than he had ever hitherto allowed her. Here, in her last furious struggle to keep a life that had given to her nothing worth having, he saw suddenly emblazoned about him, the part that she had played in his life, always from the first moment that he had known her--a part that had been, by him, so frequently neglected, so frequently denied. As she turned and saw him he was ashamed at the joy that his coming so obviously brought her. He felt her purity, her unselfishness, her single-heartedness, her courage, her nobility in that triumphant welcome that she gave him. That she should care so much for any one so worthless, so fruitless as he had proved himself to be! He had come to her with some dim sense that it was kind of him to visit her; he advanced to her now across the room with a consciousness that she was honouring him by receiving him at all. That joy, with which she had at first greeted him, had in it also something of surprise. He had forgotten how greatly these last terrible days must have altered his appearance--he told much more than he knew, and the little sad attempt that he made, as he came to her, to present as careless and happy an appearance as he had presented in the old Brockett days was more pathetic and betraying than anything he could have done. But she just closed both her burning hands about his cold one, made him sit down in a chair by her side and, trembling with the excited joy of having him with her, forced him to determine that, whatever came of it, he would keep his troubles from her, would let her know nothing of his old chuckling father and the shadowy welcome that Scaw House had flung over him, would be still the Peter that he had been when he had seen her last in London.