Thank God, Letty was very much younger than himself. When he was eighty she would be sixty-three. He tried to put away that thought, the thought that some day he would be infirm, as well as old. He looked up from his book. How odd to think that Letty had never been in this room, where he had spent so much of his life from boyhood onwards! He longed to show her some of the things he had here--family miniatures, old political caricatures, some of his favourite books--they would all interest her. He was glad he had arranged that she should have, on this visit, his dear mother's room. When he had married--close on fifty years ago--his parents had been alive, and later his wife, as the new Lady St. Amant, had not cared to take over her predecessor's apartments. She had been very little here, for soon, poor woman, she had become an invalid--a most disagreeable, selfish invalid. He told himself that after all he had had a certain amount of excuse for--well, for the sort of existence he had led so long. If poor Adelaide had only died twenty years earlier, and he had married Letty--ah, _then_, he would indeed have become an exemplary character! Yet he had been faithful to Letty--in his fashion.... No other woman had even approached near the sanctuary where the woman of whom now, to-night, he was able to think as his future wife, had at once become so securely enthroned. It had first been a delicious, if a dangerous, relationship, and, later, a most agreeable friendship. During the last few months she had become rather to his surprise very necessary to him, and these last few days he had felt how pleasant it would be to have Letty always here, at the Abbey, either in his company, or resting, reading, or writing in the room where everything still spoke to him of the long-dead mother who had been so dear to him. Of course they would wait till Oliver and Laura were married--say, till some time in February or March: and then, when those two rather tiresome younger people were disposed of, they, he and Letty, would slip up quietly to London, and, in the presence of perhaps two or three old friends, they would be made man and wife. He reflected complacently that nothing in his life would be changed, save that Letty would be there, at the Abbey, as she had been the last few days, always ready to hear with eager interest anything he had to say, always with her point of view sufficiently unlike his own to give flavour, even sometimes a touch of the unexpected, to their conversation. * * * * * A knock at the door, and his valet came in, and walked close up to the bed. "It's a telephone message, my lord. From Sir Angus Kinross--private to your lordship." "Yes. What is the message?" Lord St. Amant felt a slight tremor of discomfort sweep over him. What an odd time to send a trunk-call through--at close on midnight.