“I’ll get up and walk up and down. Perhaps by the time I count a thousand steps he’ll be here! Only a thousand little steps, dear saints, and I’ll see him, kiss him, be in his arms.” She had barely counted a hundred in her wild walk when a man’s step sounded in the hall, a man’s knock on her door. Radiant, triumphant, incredulous of her own joy, she sprang to the door and flung it wide. Every drop of blood in her body seemed to surge back to her heart. Egerton, tall, suave, middle-aged, stood on her threshold. CHAPTER XXI. STRANGERS. “Thou shalt meet him, but wilt thou greet him?” “Ah, no.” “My dear Miss Holbeach,” he said, “good morning. I am sorry to find you not well. I hope my unexpected arrival did not startle you.” And indeed she looked ill enough, and startled enough for anything, as she leaned hard on the door-handle that she might not fall. Every vestige of color had gone from her face, even her lips were ashy. “I’m only faint--I had a fright,” she could only mutter incoherently, as she tried for the breath that came so hardly, “a fright--last night.” “My poor lady,” he said quite kindly. “I see you are altogether unstrung. I came to ask you to come to my room. I wish to tell you----” “Oh! not there,” she cried, with an uncontrollable shudder. “Not there!” “May I come in here, then?” he asked courteously. “This is your sitting-room, I imagine.” Andria glanced backward at the door she had so carefully closed that Raimond Erle might not see her disordered bedroom, where she had thrown down gown after gown in the search for this one that should please him. “Come in,” she said, with white lips, anxious only to get the door into the passage shut lest Raimond might pass by, and Egerton looked at her covertly as she sank into a chair, too nerveless to stand. There must have been wild work here to make this woman look as she did. He had heard nothing from either Beryl or Salome, who had both been silent and sullen; but he knew from Andria’s face that she had seen what perhaps he had meant her to see when he brought her here, but what now--since his purpose had changed--he had nearly burst the boilers of his yacht in trying to get here in time to prevent.