But on the way, in the half-dark passage, she came across George Tressady coming up from the smoking-room. So she gave her news of Mrs. Allison's sudden illness to him, begging him to tell his wife, and to convey their hostess's regrets and apologies for this untoward break-up of the party. It was the reappearance of an old ailment, she said, and with quiet would disappear. George heard her with concern, and though his mind was active with conjectures, asked not a single question. Only, when she said good-night to him, he held her hand a friendly instant. "We shall be off as early as possible, so it is goodbye. But we shall meet in town--as you suggested?" "Please!" she said, and hurried off. But just as he reached his own door, he turned with a long breath towards the passage where he had just seen her. It seemed that he saw her still--her white face and dress, the trouble and pity under her quiet manner, her pure sweetness and dignity. He said to himself, with a sort of pride, that he had made a friend, a friend whose sympathy, whose heart and mind, he was now to explore. Who was to make difficulties? Letty? But already as he stood there, with his hand upon the handle of her door, his mind, in a kind of flashing dream, was already making division of his life between the woman he had married with such careless haste and this other, who at highest thought of him with a passing kindness, and at lowest regarded him as a mere pawn in the political game. What could he win by this friendship, that would injure Letty? Nothing! absolutely nothing. END OF VOLUME I End of Project Gutenberg's Sir George Tressady, Vol. I, by Mrs. Humphry Ward