There she paused. Abruptly she broke off, to lean forward a little, staring at him, her parted lips and dilating eyes bearing witness to an amazement so overwhelming that it overrode both her anger and her fear. Hoarse and tense came her voice at last: “Who are you? What ... what is your name?” He stared in his turn, checking in the very act of mopping his brow, wondering what it was she saw in him to be moving her so oddly. Where she stood, her face was more than half in shadow, whilst the light of that cluster of candles on the table was beating fully upon his own. He was still considering how he should answer her, what name assume, when she startled him by sparing his invention further trouble in the matter. “You are Randal Holles!” she cried on a wild, strained note. He advanced a step in a sort of consternation, breathless, some sudden ghastly emotion tearing at his heart, eyeing her wildly, his jaw fallen, his whole face livid as a dead man’s. “Randal Holles!” she repeated in that curiously tortured voice. “You! You of all men--and to do this thing!” Where there had been only wild amazement in her eyes, he beheld now a growing horror, until mercifully she covered her face with her hands. For a moment he copied her action. He, too, acting spasmodically, covered his face. The years rolled back; the room with its table laid for that infamous supper melted away to be replaced in his vision by a cherry orchard in bloom, and in that orchard a girl on a swing, teasing yet adorable, singing a song that brought him, young and clean and honourable, hastening to her side. He saw himself a lad of twenty going out into the world with a lady’s glove in his hat--a glove that to this day he cherished--bent upon knight-errantry for that sweet lady’s sake, to conquer the world, no less, that he might cast it in her lap. And he saw her--this Sylvia Farquharson of the Duke’s Theatre--as she had been in those long-dead days when her name was Nancy Sylvester. The years had wrought in her appearance a change that utterly disguised her. Where in this resplendently beautiful woman could he discover the little child he had loved so desperately? How could he have dreamt of his little Nancy Sylvester transformed into the magnificent Sylvia Farquharson, whose name he had heard used as a byword for gallantry, lavishness, and prodigality, whose fame was as widespread and questionably lustrous as that of Moll Davies or Eleanor Gwynn? He reeled back until his shoulders came to rest against the closed door, and stared and stared in dazed amazement, his soul revolted by the horror of the situation in which they found themselves. “God!” he groaned aloud. “My Nan! My little Nan!” CHAPTER XVIII THE PARLEY