Mr. Cylmer’s voice was not without temper. He marched beside her over the dun, wintry grass in silence, turning many things in his mind. “Oh!” cried Cristiane angrily, “there they are now, on the terrace. Daddy said I was to be certain to meet them when they came, and I’m not there, and it’s all your fault!” She hurried on to the great stone terrace that lay full in the wintry sunshine. Two women stood there, both tall and slender, both dressed in black. Cristiane was running now to join them, and a strange superstitious feeling made Cylmer quicken his steps after her. Somehow it was ominous--uncanny; the girl in all her youth and purity hurrying toward those strange women in black. “God only knows when she’ll get rid of them!” Cylmer growled, with more truth than he knew. As he neared them, Ismay, with a quick glance at his approaching figure through the thick, spotted net of her veil, turned quietly and went into the house. Who was this whose walk, whose face, she knew so well, even though it was only once in her life that she had seen them? She looked sharply round the great, dim hall. It was empty, the servants had gone. From its shelter, dark after the sun outside, the girl peered carefully out through the wide crack of the hall door. Oh! if it were he, how should she meet him? Would he know her? And what would he say? Her heart fairly stood still as she looked with her very soul in her eyes through the crack to the group inside. And then it bounded with a rapture that was pain. It was he--the man himself for whose sake she had been loath to leave London lest she might miss the chance sight of his face in the streets! Thirstily she drank in the strong beauty of his face, whose clear-cut lines were stamped on her heart. Not a thread of his shooting-tweeds, his dull-red tie, was lost on her. Her delicate hands were clenched hard in her smart new gloves as she stared--for who was he, and what was he doing here alone with this golden-haired girl? A wild jealousy caught her at the heart with a pain that was bodily. If he were coming in, she dared not meet him under the eyes of her mother and Cristiane le Marchant. She turned and fled swiftly into the first room she saw; it was deserted and fireless, they would not come there. And yet, while she hid, she would have given the life from her breast to meet those grave, sweet eyes again with hers. Cylmer had scarcely noticed that the younger of the two strangers had gone; he did not even look at the door through which she had vanished as he stepped to Cristiane’s side with an involuntary instinct of protectiveness. The girl grudgingly introduced him, as one might a troublesome child. “My cousin, Mrs. Trelane,” she said. She did not even mention Cylmer’s name.