There was a perceptible pause. He pulled his heavy moustache, and his shrewd eyes met hers with a look of understanding and sympathy. He did not know what her purpose had been in coming out, but he felt she had followed no idle whim, nor sought merely health or pleasure from the visit. She had come, as he had come, for a definite purpose, and while he was leaving with his mission accomplished, she returned discouraged with her object unattained. "I'm sorry for that," he said... "If there is any way in which I can be of service to you..." She shook her head. "I go back as I came," she said... "It was a venture. But at least I have the consolation of knowing that the attempt has been made. One can't help one's failures." She looked into the grave, distinguished face and smiled. "We are in danger of growing serious," she said. "Look here," he cried quickly, moved by some inexplicable and irresistible impulse, a sense of chivalry perhaps that her evident depression roused in him. "You say you are going home next week. I propose going also. If I can make my arrangements in the time, would it be agreeable to you that I should travel in the same boat?" "You!" Her voice as well as her face expressed astonishment. "Then you--Have you accomplished your purpose in coming out?" she asked. A glow of satisfaction overspread his features. "I have," he answered, and was conscious of feeling half ashamed to show his joy in the successful issue of his undertaking. She rested her hand, oblivious of the people about them, for a moment on his arm. "Oh! I'm glad," she said... "I'm glad. That's finished with. I have always felt those letters would cost another life." "God forbid!" he muttered, and added reassuringly: "They're past doing harm now... They're destroyed. I burnt them myself--to-day." She drew a long breath that was, he felt, a sigh of genuine relief. He looked at her curiously. He had never understood her interest in the letters, but he knew she was very greatly interested; and her relief in the knowledge of their destruction conclusively proved that in this matter at least she had no sympathy with Karl Van Bleit. He sometimes wondered whether he had not been mistaken in his opinion as to her feeling for Van Bleit. "They are making a move," he said to her. And then, as Theodore Smythe spoke to him in passing, he turned to her and offered her his arm. "I have the pleasure of taking you in," he added. And neither of them remembered, then or later, that his question as to travelling Home with her remained unanswered. Colonel Grey left the Smythes' early as he had arranged to do, and Mrs Lawless, who was going on elsewhere, took her departure at the same time. "I am crowding all the dissipation possible into my last week," she explained, but withheld the reason for this feverish activity.