The words seemed to sink into the silence of the September evening. A dim river mist, faintly flushed by the low sun, was creeping among the farther trees. "But he did take trouble. There is a will," she said. Her voice was so low that he did not hear what she said. "Dick made a will," she said again. This time he heard. He had been looking steadfastly at the old house among the trees, and there were tears in his eyes as he slowly turned to blink through them at her. "How can you tell?" he said apathetically. And as he looked dully at her the colour ebbed away from her face, leaving it whiter than he had ever seen a living face. "Because I was in the room when he made it--at Fontainebleau." Roger's face became overcast, perplexed. "When he was ill there?" "Yes." Dead silence. "How did you come to be with Dick?" It was plain that though he was perplexed the sinister presumption implied by her presence there had not yet struck him. "Roger, I was staying with Dick at Fontainebleau. I nursed him--Mrs. Stoddart and I together. She made me promise never to speak of it to anyone." "Mrs. Stoddart made you promise! What was the sense of that? You were travelling with her, I suppose?" "No. I had never seen her till the morning I called her in, when Dick fell ill." "Then that Mrs. Stoddart I met at Noyes was the older woman whom Lady Jane found looking after him when she and Jones came down?" "Yes." Silence again. He frowned, and looked apprehensively at her, as if he were warding something off. "And I was the younger woman," said Annette, "who left before Lady Jane arrived." The colour rushed to his face. "No," he said, with sudden violence, "not you. I always knew there was another woman, a young one, but--but--it wasn't you, Annette." She was silent. "It _couldn't_ be you!"--with a groan. "It was me." His brown hands trembled as he leaned heavily upon his stick. "I was not Dick's mistress, Roger." "Were you his wife, then?" "No." "Then how did you come to----? But I don't want to hear. I have no right to ask. I have heard enough." He made as if to go. Annette turned upon him in the dusk with a fierce white face, and gripped his shoulder with a hand of steel. "You have not heard enough till you have heard everything," she said. And holding him forcibly, she told him of her life in Paris with her father, and of her disastrous love affair, and her determination to drown herself, and her meeting with Dick, and her reckless, apathetic despair. Did he understand? He made no sign. After a time, her hand fell from his shoulder. He made no attempt to move. The merciful mist enclosed them, and dimmed them from each other. Low in the east, entangled in a clump of hawthorn, a thin moon hung blurred as if seen through tears.